The Constitution actually encourages gridlock.
By Charles C. W. Cooke
A political cartoon, published in a
newspaper at some point in the early 1990s, has long been burned into my
memory. In it, newly elected President Clinton is being shown around
the White House by a man in a butler’s uniform. Clinton arrives at a
wall on which sit an abundance of political levers and buttons and,
thrilled, his eyes widen. Yet he is quickly disappointed. “Sorry, sir,”
the orderly’s speech bubble reads, “but these are all connected to
Congress.”
The brinkmanship, gridlock, and rancor that the fight
over the continuing resolution has yielded is disliked, at least in some
manner, by almost everyone involved. But opinions as to what might be
done about it vary wildly. On Friday, Wonkblog’s Dylan Matthews
provided a suggestion: Americans, he wrote, “oughta start thinking
seriously about how to prevent divided government from ever happening
again.”
This is not partisan posturing. On the contrary, Matthews
earnestly and consistently believes that America’s system is
intrinsically unviable, and that it is to blame for our current
predicament. And he is tapping into a sentiment that is reasonably
popular among his peers. The last time that the United States teetered
toward a shutdown or a default, Slate’s Matthew Yglesias wrote
at length about what he regards as the “long-simmering problems with the
basic structure of American political institutions.” Were Yglesias to
draw the next panel of the old cartoon, he would presumably have Clinton
do some rewiring.
This line is not a new one. Hostility toward
America’s rigid separation of powers has a rich, if unappealing,
history on the Left. Woodrow Wilson — a man whose animus to the
constitutional order that he had sworn to uphold approached almost
treasonable levels — was savvy enough to recognize that the expansive
long-term ambitions of the Progressive movement were simply incompatible
with the country’s founding documents. In consequence, Wilson proposed,
Americans should change their expectations of government, invest their
democratic ambitions in one man (the president), and abandon the
country’s messy political settlement in favor of a streamlined and
“efficient” state that was more akin to that in the Kaiser’s Germany or
in the King’s Britain. “The Constitution,” Wilson wrote, “was not made
to fit us like a straitjacket. In its elasticity lies its chief
greatness.”
While his insistence that the Constitution was not
supposed to be a “straitjacket” is incorrect, Wilson and his descendants
are correct in their basic complaint: Separation of powers is
inefficient; it is an obstacle to substantial change; and it will not
only “allow” gridlock but it is explicitly designed to encourage it.
Where they are wrong is to conclude that this should change with the
times. The Constitution is the product of abiding insight into politics —
an insight that does not change with the wind. Rather amazingly,
Yglesias claims the opposite to be the case: The problem of gridlock, he
wrote in
2011, stems directly from the Founders’ having had “little in the way of
experience to guide them in thinking about how political institutions
would evolve.”
This is not simply untrue, it is the perfect
opposite of the truth. Having watched the radical transformation of the
British system during the 17th and 18th centuries — and studied
undulations of the classical world, for good measure — most of the
Founders were strikingly well versed in political theory. The
introduction of limiting tools such as the rule of law, term
restrictions, a codified constitution, a bill of rights, and divided
government were intended to dispense with the presumption, famously
termed “elective dictatorship” by Lord Hailsham, that the man who is
voted in as leader every four or so years should have carte blanche to
get things done. In other words, the Founders sought to block precisely
what Yglesias and his cohorts covet. Nobody is perfect, of course, but I
would wager everything I own that the architects of America were more
au courant with the vagaries of human nature and the concentrating
tendency of political actors than are the writers at Slate.
In
some respects, Wilson has got his wish. Witness, for example, the
peculiar manner in which many citizens, journalists, and legislators
have presumed that Obama’s wishes for the congressionally designed
budget should be the national starting point. Why? Because he won
election to head up the executive branch, obviously! It seems that our
debate has been upside-down from the start: Constitutionally speaking,
if any elections should suggest the direction of the budget and of the
laws, they are the 435 that determine the composition of the House.
Alas, this no longer appears to be the case.
The
truth that dare not speak its name is that the pronounced disharmony on
show in the United States has a clear root cause — and it is not the
structure of government. Democrats who complain that the House is being
particularly obstinate are absolutely correct — it is. But rarely do
they stop and ask “Why?” It seems obvious to me that at the root of our
interminable trench warfare is the fact that one party made the
regrettable decision to push through the most controversial piece of
social legislation in a century without a single opposition vote. That
party was, of course, entirely within its rights to do this when unified
government presented them with the chance. Nevertheless, it is childish
for it to complain that, the other side having been given a clear
mandate to try to undo the measure, it is now doing just that. Elections
do indeed “have consequences” — and that means all of them.
Critics
of the United States correctly, if oddly, point out that the system of
separated powers works only here. “We are the only country in the world
in which . . .” is a typically witless refrain. In South America, where
presidential democracies have been tried, gridlock has customarily led
to the president “speaking for the people” by ordering a military coup
and removing from the equation the legislators who demonstrated the
temerity to serve as a check and a balance.
As a result of its
mature political heritage and its British roots, the United States was
spared this trend, blossoming quickly into a country in which the
conflict that usually results from divided government is virtuously
accepted by the people as the price of liberty. In America, Yale’s Juan
Linz argues, strife that has led to violence in less-developed nations
has become regarded as “normal.” Make no mistake: Dylan Matthews and his
myopic ilk would unashamedly like to change this, rendering
illegitimate the positions of the minority and subjugating the exquisite
fractiousness of Congress to the imperium of a national leader. This
is, of course, a prerogative they enjoy as free men. But there is
nothing “progressive” about it at all.
1 comment:
Dylan Matthews and his myopic ilk would unashamedly like to change this, rendering illegitimate the positions of the minority and subjugating the exquisite fractiousness of Congress to the imperium of a national leader.
That is, of course, only while their guy is in power. The Pelosi/Reid Congress of 2007-2008 also came to loggerheads with president Bush and amazingly enough, nobody on the left was pushing this idea.
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