| 1. “While the British can turn on a dime when the voters send a new majority party into the House of Commons,” you write, “a successful constitutional moment in America takes at least a decade before a rising movement can demonstrate the broad and sustained popular support required to speak authoritatively for the People.” Is this a strength or weakness of the American system?
 Traditionally, it has been a strength. Modern presidents are forever claiming a “mandate” for sweeping change in the name of the American people. But it’s a lot harder for them to make their mandates credible—by returning again and again to the voters, and gaining their support for their vision. FDR remains the paradigm: In 1932, his New Deal was a vague aspiration; but between 1932 and 1934, Americans began to see what the Democrats were up to; they gave the Dems their emphatic support in the mid-terms, and again in 1936. By the end of the 1930s, Americans had given New Deal Democracy the sustained popular support appropriate for a fundamental change in direction.
But most presidents fail to measure up to FDR’s success—instead of winning victory after victory, their party suffers defeat in the off-year elections, and their successors refuse to build on their achievements. The question is whether presidents in the twenty-first century will respond to these frustrations by ordering the bureaucracy to implement their “vision” through executive decree—short-circuiting the resistance of Congress and the courts.
Presidents of previous eras had unilateral ambitions, but lacked the massive bureaucratic muscle to impose their will on the far-flung executive establishment. It was only in 1939 that FDR finally convinced Congress to give him six special assistants. Until that time, presidents had no permanent staff. They had no choice but to govern through their Cabinet, which often contained independent political potentates.
But today, there are more than 500 presidential superloyalists in the White House, and many more in the departments, who can function as presidential spear-bearers. The overcentralization of power in the White House is partly a consequence of the growth of the regulatory state at home and our military hegemony abroad. But it is also a result of our failure to undertake efforts for institutional reforms that will diminish the risks of a runaway presidency. ...
6. You devote relatively little space in your book to the role of Congress. Does Mitch McConnell’s recent statement that, after the 2010 election, the prime role of Republicans in Congress would be to deny Obama re-election in 2012 suggest to you any shift in the understanding of the role played by Congress in our constitutional system?
For sure, there are plenty of ways Congress can be improved. The Senate filibuster rule, for example, is an obvious abuse, though current efforts at reform are way too simplistic, and my book offers a more nuanced approach. But these congressional reforms efforts should not blind us to a key insight: the entire point of checks and balances is to provide the opposition party with powerful tools—unless, that is, some twenty-first century president manages to repeat the FDR feat of winning a series of elections that gives his party sustained control over Congress and the Court, as well as the presidency.
Until Democrats or Republicans manage to carry the country in a decisive fashion, we have only two choices—live with our partisan frustrations, or allow some future president to break the logjam through executive unilateralism. I say that we should stick with checks-and-balances. If you agree, it is past time to campaign for a series of institutional reforms that will make the risk of a runaway presidency less likely over the course of the next century. |
