Out of My Mind

Josh Marshall spells it out:

In the field I used to work in, Colonial American history, one of the perennial questions was why the colonies were plagued by chronic political instability -- particularly, why the colonial legislatures seemed so intractable, so hard to organize or discipline. That's at least what it seemed like when compared to the Parliament in London, the body upon which each of these mini-parliaments modeled themselves.

There are innumerable explanations. But one focuses on the lack of executive authority and, underlying that, the lack of patronage available to those trying to gain and wield power.

A modern version of this is playing out now in the House of Representatives, and this article in tomorrow's Washington Post shows some of the centrifugal forces that are released when an effective patronage system begins to break down.

One of the great questions of the last decade is how congressional Republicans managed to maintain such unprecedented party discipline. The standard answer is that that's how Tom DeLay earned his nickname 'The Hammer', by squashing anyone who threatened to get out of line. Only that's not really quite how the House GOP Caucus functioned. Notwithstanding the reputation DeLay liked to cultivate, he worked a lot more with Carrots than Sticks. And that means money. Lots and lots and lots of money. A lot of it unaccountable money; a lot of it 'don't ask where it came from' money; but lots and lots of money, and as long as you were there with the caucus on the important votes, a lot of it would be yours.

You can't understand the K Street Project or the sort of slush fund Jack Abramoff was running without understanding that Tom DeLay had built a very effective patronage machine -- one that organized a great deal of the money in the city in the hands of the political leadership.

And the rest is here.