Every four years this country gears up for an electoral contest which comes to preoccupy everyone, and on which we spend billions of dollars. The candidates promise to save the country and correct whatever the previous incumbent did or did not do. And then we are almost inevitably disappointed with the choice we made when he does not do what we thought he would do, or worse, does things we did not want. In between the Presidential elections we almost always have a backlash against the President and his policies. Has anyone besides myself ever thought "Is this any way to run a democracy?"
In fact this was not the way the system was designed, but then what did the Founders know? They had good intentions, but the result was not what they wanted, or at least said they wanted, and in some ways it was the opposite of what they wanted. It is useful to consider how this came about.
The intent of the founders in designing the Constitution was to have a strong executive, in contrast to the lack of an executive under the Articles of Confederation. The federal government needed to have clear authority over the individual state governments. After much discussion they decided to embody the executive in one person, the President, rather than an executive council, and to have the President chosen by an electoral college rather than by Congress, or the people, for four years rather than for life. The electoral college was supposed to be above petty politics, choosing the President on the basis of his administrative competence.
The founders thought of the President as the administrator of the legislation passed by Congress, and no more. His job was no more than to see that the legislation is carried out by the executive personnel. He was to be clearly subordinate to Congress. The first set of Presidents, the founding generation, those who were directly involved in forming the government, up to John Quincy Adams, understood this expectation, and acted overtly as if they were subordinate to the legislature. (Take that Tea Party people; we can play the original intent game too.)
In fact, however, starting with Washington, Presidents were covertly engaging in policymaking and leading the legislature in its deliberations. The reality was that the President was never just an administrator and faithful executor of the will of Congress. Why was this so?
Just as with many of us, the actions the founders took did not always conform to their intentions. Just as when we first get married and form a family, we all have good intentions about how the family will be run, but we have the tendency in spite of our intentions to reproduce the family from which we came. Similarly, although the founders intended to produce a democratic republic, they tended in fact to produce a government with which they were familiar, the colonial government in which they grew up. That government was a basically undemocratic feudal government modeled on the government in Britain in the 1600s or even 1500s.
The colonial governments had a governor who was independent of the legislature, and could overrule the actions of the legislature. He was answerable only to the owners of the colonial charter, and ultimately only to the king. For the colony he was a king. The legislatures were clearly subordinate to the governor. The judiciary, on the other hand, was to an extent independent even of the governor. It was answerable more directly to the judiciary in Britain.
In effect the founders reproduced this colonial government, with an independent President, a subordinate Congress, and an independent judiciary. The only problem for the founders was that there was no longer anyone for the President to answer to, different from the country itself. If the President were truly no more than an administrator, this would not have been a problem, but it quickly became a problem. Their solution was to claim that the President somehow represented all of the people, in a way different than the way the House of Representatives represented all of the people.
This tweak in the rationale for our system seemed to have satisfied people for the time being, but it introduced a basic confusion and ambiguity in our system. How can two separate parts of the government represent the same thing, the people? A democratic system requires that the representative decision making body consist of more than one person: otherwise there is no room for debate and decision making by majority rule. In what sense does one person, the President, equally represent all of the people?
To me we can not continue to live with this unnecessary confusion and ambiguity.
Next: The subordination of the House