Tag: Senator Mitch McConnell

The Story: The Trump administration has said that it would like an up or down vote in the US Senate on the confirmation of Judge...

As odd as it sounds, political parties in democracies have an important anti-democratic function. Long before voters decided anything in the primary or general elections, party bosses worked to groom good candidates, weed out bad ones, organize interests, and frame issues. We’ve only taken the parties out of politics.” Outside groups — the National Rifle Association, Planned Parenthood, unions, etc. “Until the 1960s, the national convention was a communications medium,” Barone writes. Today, political conventions are little more than infomercials for presidential candidates. Opinion websites and TV and radio hosts now do more to shape issues and select candidates than the parties do. McConnell’s point about money in politics is analogous to the larger trend. When you take political power out of the parties, other actors seize it. It’s why the cable-news networks spend so much of their time rallying voters in one direction or another. There are other, larger forces at work.