[The European Conservative] Vox's Bridge to Nowhere

The party’s no-confidence motion to oust PM Pedro Sánchez amounts to little more than a gimmick.

In his recent scholarly book Losing to Win (2020), University of Nevada political scientist Jeremy Gelman probes the causes of an unsettling phenomenon in American politics — the recession of lawmaking. Gelman argues that as partisan polarization has intensified nationwide, and as cable TV and Netflix shows have dramatized the workings of Washington, Congress has increasingly undermined its own role as the venue for drafting, debating, amending, and passing the nation’s laws. Instead, the House — and to a lesser extent the Senate — have gradually become the stage for filibusters, partisan bickering, personalistic grandstanding, and performative pieces of legislation such as bills termed ‘dead on arrival’ (DoA). Borrowed from the medical jargon’s term for a patient that arrives dead at the clinical ward, this phrase refers to bills that are known to lack the requisite threshold of support to warrant wider consideration, but that are nonetheless filed to score messaging points.

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