In the United States, liberals represent the American left. And liberals tend to be Democrats.  It has been my observation that generally speaking, liberals despise democracy. They either make use of obscure procedural tricks or the courts to get their way.

Rarely do you get to have such a great example of quintessential characteristics of a modern American liberal.  This week, David Obey, a Democrat from Wisconsin is single handedly holding up a supplemental military funding bill to pay for the war in Iraq.

How is he doing it? Thanks to internal rules for the House of Representatives (and these rules are not in the US Constitution, they're simply procedural in nature), the chairman of the appropriations committee can table bills. That is, a single individual in the house of representatives is able to decide for the entire United States what US policy is going to be.

Odds are, you didn't have a chance to vote for or against David Obey.  But no matter, he sees himself as the self appointed arbiter of US policy. You may not like Bush or the War in Iraq but the American people voted in a fair election for him to be in a position to be President who has broad powers over foreign policy given to him by the constitution.  By contrast, Obey is abusing a procedural mechanism to take on almost dictatorial powers on appropriations.

The way it is supposed to work is that the bill is put to a vote by the house of representatives (yay or nay). This way, our representatives have to go on record either supporting or opposing the bill.  But not now. Thanks to Obey, we can potentially look forward to a system in which highly partisan politicians in safe districts are embedded into choke points that can block votes.