Henry Waxman's Retirement Captures Congress's Transformation Into a Quasi-Parliamentary Institution

From Ronald Brownstein, at National Journal, "The End of the Power of One":

Henry Waxman could be the last person in Washington to acknowledge that there may never be another Henry Waxman. His departure captures a fundamental shift in Congress that has vastly reduced the ability of any individual member to shape policy as consequentially as he did.

Waxman, a Democratic representative from Los Angeles first elected in the 1974 Watergate class, announced last week he would retire after this session. No other legislator over his four-decade career—and few in any era—affected the daily lives of more Americans than Waxman, who shepherded into law landmark bills on clean air, clean water, access to health care, tobacco regulation, nutritional labeling, food safety, HIV/AIDS, and generic drugs.

Over his remarkable tenure, Waxman embodied the definition of a great legislator: He created coalitions that would not have existed without him. Most of his major accomplishments were passed with significant Republican support. Waxman demonstrated that a single legislator, with enough skill and tenacity, can leave an indelible mark.

That has been true through most of Congress's history. But since the 1980s, power has passed from individual legislators to the parties collectively. Each side has centralized more authority in the party leadership. And far fewer members are willing to buck their party's consensus to partner with legislators from the other side, no matter how skillfully they craft a compromise.

The result has been to greatly diminish the ability of even the most brilliant legislators—whether Waxman or senators like Ted Kennedy and Bob Dole—to break stalemates by creatively assembling coalitions no one else could envision. "It's hard for a guy like that to emerge now on either side," says former Rep. Tom Davis, the Republican who chaired the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee when Waxman was the ranking Democrat. Adds Steve Elmendorf, a former top House Democratic aide, "The leadership is not going to give you the space to do it."

Instead, in almost all cases, each party's leadership now decides whether to reach agreement with the opposition—or, more often, to not agree. Rather than negotiating their own compromises, legislators are expected to salute their party's collective decision. "The best way to put it," Davis says, "is we've turned into a parliamentary system."

Waxman's a bleeping barnacle of bankrupt regressive leftism.

But this is interesting from an institutional standpoint.

More.