Feehery: In defense of partisanship

Partisanship is essential to democracy.  

So is a strong two-party system where the voters get a real choice between two different visions of governance.  

Those who bemoan partisanship don’t understand its vital role in keeping politicians honest and keeping America moving forward.  

Without partisanship, we wouldn’t have ever ended the COVID-19 shutdowns and we would all still be wearing masks. After all, it was the courageous governors in Georgia, Florida, South Dakota and Iowa who challenged the official narratives and freed the American people from the worst public policy disaster in our nation’s history.

Without partisanship, we wouldn’t have had whistleblowers come forward and tell us about Hunter Biden’s alleged crimes.  

You think Democrats have any interest in exposing that type of malfeasance?  

Partisanship exposed the House bank scandal in 1991 and ended 40 years of Democratic misrule of the people’s house. Partisanship raised questions about the unwise invasion of Iraq. Partisanship exposed the excesses of the Nixon administration and stopped the Johnson administration’s drift into socialism. 

Partisanship stopped FDR and Joe Biden from packing the Supreme Court.

They don’t have partisanship in Russia, China or North Korea. There, if you challenge the regime, you get thrown in jail like Alexei Navalny, get disappeared like Qin Gang or murdered like countless bureaucrats in the Hermit Kingdom.

The Fourth estate in America used to play an essential role in keeping Democratic politicians in check, but that’s old news these days. National Public Radio, which is owned by the government, best exemplifies how the media is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party. That makes it even more essential that Republicans gain control of at least some branches of the government when there is a Democrat in the White House. 

We know how bad one-party rule can be in the U.S., just by watching the decline and fall of our biggest cities. Look what has happened to Washington. D.C., where there is no check on the goofy progressives who think that getting rid of plastic straws will save the planet and that defunding the police will help stop crime.  

I am not a big fan of third-party movements in the United States. They are usually a complete waste of time and they weaken the two-party system. They only really are useful if the third party successfully replaces an existing party, like how the Republican Party replaced the Whig Party in the 19th century. Mostly, third party rebellions are used to fundamentally change the character of one of the existing parties. Ross Perot’s Reform Party was an effort to make the Republican Party more populist. The Populist Party did the same thing to the Democrats at the turn of the century. 

The No Labels party is less a movement and more an effort by a few elite millionaires to stop partisanship in America. They want to draft Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman (R) to lead a ticket for those Americans who despise partisanship. And for Manchin, who represents an overwhelmingly Republican state, forgetting about partisan labels might be his only lifeline to reelection. But No Labels is not a serious movement.  

America can’t function without partisanship. It is essential to how we resolve disagreements and make our democracy work. We have a lot of opinions in this country. Federalism and a strong two-party system is how we keep the political system honest, how we expose corruption and how we stop authoritarianism.  

It is when the politicians from two political parties stop representing their constituents and start only representing the vested interests of the political class that we start running into trouble.  

That’s why we have elections and why we have partisanship. Partisanship might seem like a curse, but it is a true blessing that keeps our nation free.   

Feehery, a partner at EFB Advocacy, blogs at thefeeherytheory.com. He served as spokesman to former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), as communications director to former House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and as a speechwriter to former House Minority Leader Bob Michel (R-Ill.).