Hold this

Ezra Klein thinks the nakedly sleazy hostage taking that Richard Shelby is doing right now is a good opportunity for Democrats to show how Republicans have no desire to run a responsible government.

But Shelby has likely overplayed his hand. The reason holds work is that they're small enough, and rare enough, that they never rise to the level of something the majority can't live with. Shelby, in putting a hold on all pending nominations, just made holds very big indeed. And he did it for the most pathetic and parochial of reasons: pork for his state. If the Democrats have any sense at all, Shelby's hold is about to become as famous as Nelson's deal.

I'm not sure it's going to work for Dems, even if they did have the stones to actually kick up a fuss and the servile Washington media tribe has any interest in pursuing Shelby's kidnapping of the U.S. government in service to his client, Airbus. To prove my point, I give you...Ezra Klein.

But I'm a bit less taken with his belief that the "dynamic is unlikely to change until the voters get so disgusted that they are willing to indiscriminately turn out all incumbents, irrespective of party and ideology." We're there, and have been for some time. The House has been more competitive in the past decade than in the four decades that preceded it. Every couple of years, the voters toss the majority party out of office. Americans hate how Washington works, and they keep trying to punish the people in charge.

But that just rewards the scoundrels. The people in charge aren't in charge of this. What Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole proved was that minority could make the people angry at Washington if it could bring all business to a halt and deafen voters with the partisan bickering. If Americans were dedicated students of Congress, they might respond by punishing the people who're responsible for poisoning the process. But only a quarter of Americans can identify 60 votes as the number needed to break a filibuster. Another 25 percent think it's 51 votes, and the rest don't really know. When people are angry at Washington, they do the logical thing and take it out on the folks who're putatively running the place.

That congressional rules give the minority the power to decide the success of the majority's agenda is so unintuitive that it's pretty much impossible to run elections based off the concept. Even when the voters do turn on incumbents, the majority of the incumbents come from whichever party holds the gavel, so the election is looks like a repudiation of the majority. Voting against Washington looks functionally the same as voting against the party in power, and that's why the minority acts the way it does, and will continue until it loses these tools.

Republicans are much more effective in the minority than they are in the majority. They can't run a government, but they can lock up the government any time they so choose, knowing that voters will be angered by the "partisan bickering" and level their rage on the party in "power."