With the Senate poised to ram through a horrendous, arguably unconstitutional piece of legislation that will do irrevocable harm to our country if eventually signed into law, it might seem a bit odd to muse on the success of Framers’ constitutional design.  But when you take a step back, you realize that the intent of the Framers to slow down the machinery of government continues to thrive today.

A year ago Barack Obama was elected president.  He has complete control of the Executive branch of government.  Democrats widened their majority in the House, and obtained a super majority in the Senate, ending up with a filibuster proof majority by the middle of this year.  Meanwhile, the federal judiciary remains somewhat divided as our Supreme Court is essentially a 4-4 split with the Nation’s legal balance at the mercy of Anthony Kennedy’s mood.

So the Democrats have complete control of two of the three branches of the federal government, along with control of a majority of state governments.  Yet this year they have accomplished little in the way of meaningful long-term legislation.  They rammed through a stimulus package that costs taxpayers near a trillion dollars and expanded our federal debt without doing much in the way of actual stimulus.  But this was a one-time only piece of legislation that does not create a new federal entitlement program.  Meanwhile, cap-and-trade legislation passed the House of Representatives, but it is stalled in the Senate, and it is fairly unlikely that any substantial bill will ultimately get passed (though the EPA could act).  And despite huge legislative majorities and a seemingly favorable political mood for reform, at least at the beginning of the year, Democrats have only managed to get some kind of reform near passage through heavy compromise, cajoling, and outright bribery, and it’s still only a 50/50 proposition that President Obama will ever get any legislation to sign.

So despite this considerable numerical advantage, Democrats have not been able to enact the sort of radical “reforms” their supporters believed were imminently on the horizon.  There are numerous factors – the economy made environmental reform less palatable, significant public support for health care reform never materialized, Blue Dog Democrats remained reluctant to sign on to change – but, ultimately, we can thank the constitutional design of the Framers for making radical innovation difficult to achieve.  The Framers did not intend to make change impossible – that would have been manifestly wrong – but they did seek to create a system that limited the power of the government to act swiftly thanks to mechanisms such as checks and balances and the separation of powers. The country has changed in myriad ways, and the constitutional system has been altered considerably especially over the past 80 years.  But the Constitution still has a strong heartbeat, one that is stronger than even the more pessimistic among us realize.