What Goes Around. . .

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recently stated he anticipates more bipartisan cooperation in 2018.  That's right, Mitch McConnell said that.  The same Mitch McConnell who bragged about stonewalling former President Obama's Supreme Court nominee in Obama's final year in office.  The same McConnell who was an integral part of the opposition party's obstructionist strategy.  It doesn't take an expert pundit to figure out what's going on here: McConnell knows the GOP will get crushed in next year's midterms, so he's suddenly realized the value of cooperation so he can extract some favorable legislation before his political capital expires.  So now he wants to play nice - how convenient.  There are probably countless members of the Democratic Party, both voters and elected officials, who don't feel McConnell and the GOP deserve any quarter whatsoever, and who have no intention of cutting them even a millimeter of slack; and given Republicans' conduct during the last eight years, who could blame them?

Here's the thing, though: as gratifying as telling the GOP to get stuffed sounds, it's a bad idea - for a combination of obvious and not-so-obvious reasons.  (Quick note: I'm referring almost entirely to the obscure Congressional rules in this post, not any policy positions; as far as I'm concerned, the GOP is on the wrong side of history on many contemporary social issues - civil rights, environmental protections, education, the church/state separation, among others - and they don't deserve any consideration on these points.  History and sociological research have already rendered verdicts, and it's time for the GOP's policy stances to be thrown onto the pile of failed ideas.  Okay - tangent over.) For one thing, neither party manages to hold a majority forever, so any procedural changes a party makes to the will eventually get passed along to the other party; and when that happens, you're giving the opposition better tools to push its agenda and undo your accomplishments.  It's foolishly shortsighted to behave as if you'll be the party in power for more than a few years, and that the changes you make won't come back to haunt you.  For another, some politicians have long memories and vindictive attitudes; so any Democratic politicians' pettiness or slights will get filed away in the "what goes around, comes around" cabinet.

Something needs to be done, though, because the GOP went beyond an opposition party to sabotaging the government with their obstructionist tactics.  Here's a baseball analogy: have you ever watched a game where the batter steps out of the box over and over, to frustrate the pitcher and get him to do something dumb? It's technically within the rules, but it's an unsportsmanlike exploitation of a loophole.  That's exactly what the GOP did with Merrick Garland: the Constitution says the Senate gives "advice and consent" over SCOTUS nominees, so the Senate had no obligation to give Garland a nomination hearing.

Someone might ask why Congress doesn't just rewrite the rules so there aren't loopholes for any party to exploit.  It's a pretty obvious solution, after all; but saying it would be difficult is like saying the sun is kind of warm.  Let's take a look at the possible ways of going about it, and all the obstacles in the way.

• The White House/Supreme Court intervenes.  Nope, awful idea.  Congress is, in many ways, a self-policing organization, and that's by design according to the principles of separation of powers and checks & balances.  Letting it write its own procedural rules leads to some disastrous results, as anyone who pays attention to government knows; but designating the Executive or Judicial Branch to manage it means Congress ceases to exist as a coequal branch of government.  Additionally, reforming Congress is outside the scope of either of the other two governmental branches.  This might solve the problem of Congressional mismanagement, but creates a far bigger one.
• Congress reforms itself.  Good luck making this happen.  Neither of the two parties truly wants to close any of those procedural loopholes.  As I already explained, the majority party likes having those little "cheat codes" while they're in power, and the minority party knows it will have its own turn sooner or later.  (For example, the Garland nomination fiasco: Mitch McConnell rightly accused the Democratic Party of hypocrisy, noting that it had done nearly the same thing during the Bush II Administration.) Those little political machinations also provide good material for reelection ads: "The other party did X, Y, and Z. Send me back to Washington and I'll clean up its mess." Which they might, but not in a way that solves the underlying issue or that can't be reversed within a few election cycles.  Senators and Representatives like those procedural tricks, and the only way to put a stop to it would be to "reboot" Congress: send every single member packing (What, you think they all came in knowing how to manipulate the processes? Someone more experienced taught them.), and strip away all those arcane rules that accumulated over the decades.
• An outside oversight agency.  There are risks involved, such as the agency being co-opted or supplanted by political insiders, and its mission distorted and turned into a partisan weapon.  Case in point: between 1976 and 1988, the League of Women Voters organized and hosted presidential debates; unfortunately, the League relinquished the task to the Commission on Presidential Debates, an organization established by the two major parties that has drawn criticism for allegedly working to exclude 3rd-party candidates.  Even if the agency was not co-opted, it would still add another layer of bureaucracy to the federal government.  
• Grassroots efforts (ballot initiatives, etc.).  It has potential, especially as people have gotten more politically active during Trump's administration; but there's no guarantee that the momentum will sustain itself.  Some Americans also possess more zeal than knowledge, and that's a moderate problem with this approach.

Those are some pretty big challenges to overcome, so the likelihood of forging a cooperative set of rules is very slim.  Not impossible, but very unlikely.  There's one other thing to consider: the risk of going too far.  I've already given my take, which is that the GOP is going beyond acting like a minority party; but many of those "cheat codes" serve an important purpose in a democracy.  A minority party needs some protections, to keep the majority from imposing its will at every turn.  This creates a lot of watered-down and unpopular compromises, but hey, that's democracy.  The GOP's obstructionism could provoke a predictable overreaction that sweeps away many important safeguards against the tyranny of the majority.  That cure would be worse than the disease.

Bottom line: I think we're stuck with what we have now.  The likely outcome is that nothing changes, and the best case scenario is a very modest improvement.  That's not very rose-colored, but it is what it is.