Cut Down the Presidency

U nder our nation’s pre-1789 government, a single legislative branch managed to select the right military commander for the American War of Independence and with him defeated the most powerful nation on earth to achieve full political independence. No president needed. When Alexander Hamilton was asked about the problem of that American government, he did not think of a need for an executive: “The fundamental defect is a want of power in Congress,” he said.

Imagine if he could see it now. Congress has simply surrendered to the president some of its most important powers. Or, more troubling, it has given over its powers to the presidency as an institution, apart from any president. It has handed these powers over to a nebulous set of executive-branch institutions and figures that the elected president may hardly control.

We just finished a four-year term in which a great many bureaucrats at the Pentagon and the Federal Reserve ran — independently of the directives coming out of the White House, or even at odds with them — a great deal of foreign policy and monetary policy. These bureaucrats displayed their perfect indifference to the nominal head of the executive branch and made clear that they had not a worry about Congress.

Congress’s own laws, by request of the president, often feature this embarrassingly demure phrase: “The Secretary shall determine.” Those four word leave the details of governance to unelected hands. The phrase removes accountability from elected officials and gives power to a permanent bureaucracy ruled by its own interests. These determinations of executive-branch policymakers, and the raft of executive-branch orders, create a regime in which our major political factions don’t have to compromise and therefore don’t settle issues for generations. Instead, they seem to run two separate governments of the United States, neither faction giving the other an inch. When the presidency changes hands, one faction of the permanent government goes into temporary dormancy, waiting to be reawakened.

Most of the debates about the drafting of the Constitution focused on shaping and restraining the extremely powerful Congress that Article I of the Constitution was creating. So powerful was this Congress that many of the delegates thought that the executive branch would be a plaything in the hands of Congress.

And why wouldn’t it? Even now, Congress has the power to shrink the federal government to almost nothing. Just with the power of the purse, Congress could zero out all the agencies of the executive branch and shrink the presidency down to a vice president and president, putting every cabinet secretary out of work tomorrow. The Federal Reserve could be shrink-wrapped and the armed services abolished. Congress has the power to remove every single federal court except the Supreme Court, though Congress could reduce the number of Supreme Court justices to one and strip it of almost all jurisdiction.

In most parliamentary systems, the executive is a puppet of the legislature, which has supreme authority. But a curious constitutional evolution means that the United Kingdom’s Boris Johnson, like other parliamentary leaders, has — or had — the power to terminate or postpone a session of Parliament and call new elections. In the American system, a lowly committee of junior representatives from the sticks could force the elected president to spend all his working hours in the Rayburn House Office Building reading them extracts from Herodotus or the phone book. Congress really could actualize Grover Norquist’s dream of shrinking government to a size that could be drowned in a bathtub — maybe two bathtubs, if one accounts for the hefty President Taft.

But it hasn’t turned out this way. James Burnham’s essential book Congress and the American Tradition outlines that one reason for this is that the executive branch was initially manned by the nation’s best men: George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. George Washington’s self-restraint made him a great man and a great president. But it also made the presidency itself great, something like the object of the emerging nation’s democratic cult. The impeachment power never developed as envisioned — as a powerful check on presidential ambition and power.

And now most men and women elected to Congress act like spectators to power. Many of them come to office apparently eager to matriculate from the Article 1 congressional branch into the perches of real power — as lobbyists, think-tank presidents, or media personalities.

The democratic character of the American people is withering surely in part because of the near total capture of the democratic spirit and imagination by the presidency, and the presidency’s capture by the administrative state. The fact that an unaccountable professional “policy class” has come to dominate national governments has motivated rebellious populist-nationalist movements across the developed world. When legislatures stopped making laws, the possibility of bargaining, compromise, and conciliation evaporated.

The people have been exiled from their own self-government. And the only way back is for Congress to begin cutting the executive branch and all its bureaucrat-run agencies down to size.