Am I a Radical?

To make a related point to the previous post, I'm not sure I'd term calls for procedural reform "radical," much less "revolutionary." The history of Congress is, in part, a history of procedural reforms. Newt Gingrich made a bunch of changes in 1994. Democrats made a bunch of changes in 1975. John F. Kennedy made some big changes in the early 1960s. FDR changed the way Congress worked, and so too did Woodrow Wilson. This isn't something invented by a bunch of bloggers in the early 21st century.

There's nothing abnormal about changing the rules of a governing body in response to changes in the country. It's pretty common, for instance, for political scientists to remark on the incredible rise in party polarization in recent decades. According to Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthale, political polarization is at its highest point since Reconstruction:

Previously, we handled that problem by enduring a Great Depression and letting FDR and the Democrats take over the country for awhile. That worked to loosen the levers of Congress a bit. And I guess we can wait until a fiscal crisis does something similar for one party or the other. Call that "the Californian strategy."

But we could also agree that this level of polarization makes it virtually impossible to govern in a system that is designed to foil majorities and require a constant three-fifths consensus. It's not good if the country is virtually impossible to govern. Problems don't stop mounting while we try and figure things out. We could respond to this by making it easier for the majority party to govern and thus less likely that we have some sort of massive crisis that totally realigns our politics. I think that's actually less radical than waiting for some calamity to reshape our political system.

As for specific reforms I'd advocate, there's nothing on this list that I disagree with.