If they were allowed to go under, their partisans warned, the consequences would ripple through the economy at a cost too high to bear.
"With Kavanaugh's decision to kind of fight back on explicit partisan grounds, one consequence of that is it just drags the Supreme Court right into the center of a bitter partisan feud," said Jens David Ohlin, a vice dean and law professor at Cornell Law School.
I do not know if the C.I.A. officers responsible for funding Partisan Review had these consequences in mind, but it was certainly a good use of covert funding.
Research has suggested a long-term decline in turnout at national elections in western democracies since the 1970s; it seems most likely that this is a consequence of partisan dealignment (i.e., a weakening of partisan identification), the erosion of social cleavages based on class and religion, and increasing voter discontent.
The consequence of the partisan struggle was to restore democracy and civil liberties to Italy.
The consequence of this partisan skew is that what Chicagoans refer to as "downstate," meaning anything outside the Chicago metropolitan area (as New Yorkers refer to Binghamton or Buffalo as "upstate"), makes up close to half the Republican turnout.
Congress' inability to pass a farm bill was another consequence of the partisan warfare that erupted between the House and Senate after Republicans regained control of the lower chamber after the 2010 midterm election.
Other scientists and government officials say the breakdown of credibility is another consequence of the fiercely partisan fighting that has flourished in the Bush administration, where environmentalists and industry advocates battle over every clause and semicolon of regulation.
In the Senate, victory revealed many senators to be more interested in their partisan fight with the president than the consequences of their actions in the world.
