Jonathan Bernstein has written this piece for Salon responding to my new draft article (which I presented Saturday at the excellent Drake Law School symposium), Political Dysfunction and Constitutional Change.

Jonathan begins:

The American political system is not broken. What’s broken is the Republican Party. And it’s not clear how it will recover.

What’s wrong with American politics and what can be done about it is the question that election law expert Rick Hasen sets for himself in a fascinating new paper. In particular, he asks whether American politics is so broken that the only cure is to chuck the Constitution and replace it with a parliamentary system or some other radical systemic reform.

He continues:

I think the emphasis on partisan polarization is misplaced. There’s nothing about strong partisanship that makes effective government in the U.S. impossible. That Hasen highlights budget problems makes this, in my view, especially clear. Budgets are, by their nature, fairly easy to cut deals on! Indeed: I suspect the game theorists might actually find that it should be easier for two well-organized parties to cut those deals, even if their ideal points are quite distant, than it would be to reach a deal between unstructured, factionalized parties, even if there are no extremists among them. During the current 113th Congress, all that should be needed is for the captains of both teams to find an agreeable midpoint, and budget issues can be solved.

And yet: dysfunction, crises, threats of shutdown and irrational outcomes no one claims to want.

My conclusion? It’s not partisanship. It’s not polarization. It’s not even extremism.

It’s the Republican Party. The GOP is broken. Not too conservative; not too extreme. I have no view of where the GOP “should” be ideologically, and I don’t think there’s much evidence that being “too conservative” per se is losing elections for Republicans.

I hope to write a response to Jonathan’s very interesting piece soon.  In the meantime, I’ll be doing a live chat tomorrow at Talking Points Memo about the new piece.  It should begin at 6 pm eastern.  Thanks also to Taagen Goddard’s excellent Wonk Wire (now housed at Roll Call) for making my paper its Abstract of the Week.