Authors: Hedrick Smith
Most ailments in our political system are nuisances which irk us, but which we have no serious intention of curing. Typical is the compulsive reelection campaigning that makes many in Congress only part-time legislators. Even during their four-day week in Washington, they are forever distracted from the business of government by the need to curry favor with constituents or to raise money. As Will Rogers once quipped, “Politics has got so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to get beat with.”
People talk about two major ways to deal with this problem. One is to change the rules for campaign financing. To end the frenzied fund-raising, the public-interest lobby Common Cause advocates full government subsidies for congressional elections. A variation, pushed by Senate Democrat David Boren of Oklahoma, combines modest private donations with a government subsidy contingent on overall campaign spending limits. The argument is that full government subsidies would weaken political parties even more and reduce the political involvement of ordinary citizens. Too low a spending limit would have the same effect. The best approach is a mix of private funds and public subsidies (TV time as well as funds).
The second, more fundamental reform would be to lengthen House terms from two to four years, as former President Nixon has proposed.
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Stretching out the election cycle would give House members more breathing time between elections and ease the pressure to campaign constantly. But it would not eliminate the problem; even with six-year terms, some senators raise funds and campaign throughout their terms. Most, however, go lighter on campaigning for two or three years, and longer House terms should allow a similar improvement.
Another pet peeve of voters is the explosion of negative campaign advertising, in the voices of anonymous announcers and with graphic video gimmickry. One way to reduce that practice is to force candidates to deliver the attacks personally. For it is an old axiom of the campaign game that the candidate should stay as far as possible from making smear charges and let stand-ins do it for him. The logic is that if voters react negatively to mudslinging, they are less likely to punish the candidate if he does not personally sling the mud. A law requiring candidates to appear on fifty percent or more of the airtime of each of their campaign ads should make many of them pause before using smear tactics.
A third target of public griping is the disarray in Congress. Merely members cry for greater discipline. Howard Baker, bowing out in 1985 as Senate majority leader, asserted that the triple bottlenecks of budget, authorizing, and appropriating committees beg for consolidation of power in the budget process. Florida Democrat Lauton Chiles announced in 1987 that he was retiring because of frustration with the budget quagmire. Clearly, when politicians of such different stripes as liberal Democrat Thomas Eagleton and conservative Republican Barry Goldwater agree that the Senate is in a state of anarchy because of excessive filibustering, turf-fighting committees, and parliamentary stalling, the time has come to trim the capacity of the naysayers to paralyze that body. It is time to reduce the numbers of subcommittees (in both houses) and to streamline the Senate rules, to permit the majority leader to bring up a bill for debate without facing a filibuster before debate begins.
But these all involve tinkering, not tackling the primary problems in the functioning of government. Prime attention belongs elsewhere. There are two paramount problems that demand attention and some changes in public attitudes, as well as remedial action. Paradoxically, these are contrary problems—one of excessive power and the other of insufficient power.
The first, most visible problem in the wake of the Iran-
contra
scandal, is the recurring excesses of presidents—either personally or through aggressive staff activism—to grasp greater power than the laws or the Constitution grants. This is especially dangerous in the commitment of American forces abroad.
The second, more chronic ailment, is the fragmentation of power (exacerbated by the weakness of political parties and the partisan divisions in government). Fragmentation often leaves our politicians wallowing in deadlock because the government lacks the cohesion to form the durable coalitions, needed to resolve the nation’s most demanding problems.
The Presidential Blowup
Presidential power is a dilemma for Americans. We look to presidents not only to lead our government but to personify the nation. We romanticize presidential power each time we select a new leader, or we berate congressional resistance when our favorite president is stalemated. We hate to see our presidency humbled. But when presidential misjudgment or deceit leads us into the bloody quagmire of Vietnam, the burning embarrassment of a Watergate, or the shocking deception
of arms sold to Iran for hostages while our leader preaches against dealing with terrorists, we are deeply disillusioned. Even if grudgingly, we celebrate the independence of Congress and the rule of law.
Our most painful failures in the past two decades have arisen from presidential overreaching. It is worth recalling that this seems a special vulnerability of reelected presidents, a hubris evidently nourished by overwhelming landslide victories. Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan seemed to share a temporary illusion of presidential omnipotence, a sense that the nation had mandated them to do as they willed and a feeling that they—or their cause—somehow stood beyond law and accountability. Each time, their insistence on having their own way, overriding concerns of the opposition, and their loss of credibility were searing—both to the presidency and to the nation. Overconfidence and disdain for the premise that this is a nation of shared power humbled all three men.
“There is an axiom about the White House,” the late Bryce Harlow, a confidant of Eisenhower, Johnson, and Nixon remarked to me. “The president who wins real big will blow himself up.”
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Beyond the separation of powers and the slow justice meted out by Congress, it is hard to devise institutional fixes to protect in advance against titanic flaws of judgment and character. But some protectives are needed to check the president’s de facto power to send American servicemen into battle.
The Founding Fathers, seeing the gravest potential danger in the war power, split that power between the president as commander in chief and Congress as the body with the power to declare war and to raise armies, to provide a navy, and to fund the military. But modern conditions have eroded the balance of the Constitution. From the Revolution through World War II, American armies demobilized after the conflict; with each new war, a president had to go to Congress to raise a new combat army and navy. But since the Cold War, specifically the Korean War, the country has had a standing Army and Navy in peacetime.
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The president gained the de facto capacity to wage war—without congressional action to declare war or to raise an Army. And once American forces are committed, Congress feels powerless to deny them funds and weapons and ammunition. In short, Congress has lost its share of the war power. No war has been declared since World War II, but hundreds of thousands of Americans have fought in Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, the Dominican Republic, and Grenada.
In the nuclear age, with a global adversary, Congress has accepted that a president must have the capacity to act quickly to deal with
substantial and imminent emergencies. But alarmed by unilateral presidential actions, it has tried to restore the Constitution’s partnership on warmaking by asserting its authority to approve or annul presidential action. The War Powers Resolution of 1973, requiring congressional approval of the commitment of American forces to a combat zone or their withdrawal within ninety days of American engagement in hostilities, was born of frustration over Lyndon Johnson’s sending half a million American troops into Vietnam without an explicit declaration of war. Reagan’s use of American Marines in Lebanon in 1983 and naval forces in the Persian Gulf in 1987 renewed the constitutional tug of war. No president, from Nixon to Reagan, has accepted the constitutionality of the War Powers Resolution. But members of Congress have filed suit to test its constitutionality, and if it is not tested and upheld in some form by the Supreme Court, a constitutional amendment may be needed to restore the original checks and balances on the presidential power to take the nation to war all by himself.
To deal with various problems of governing, Jimmy Carter and others have proposed a single six- or seven-year term for the president, but this is the wrong way to move.
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One danger is that one term would render a president a lame-duck quite early, in terms of his capacity to persuade Congress. More important, removing any chance for a second term removes the check on a president of being held accountable by the voters in an election. In fact, the current two-term limit may remove such restraints in second-term presidents. To protect against excesses, it might be wise to go in the opposition direction: to revoke the current two-term limit. That would put all presidents on their best behavior—always thinking they could run one more time.
The Iran-
contra
affair has prompted talk of other measures: a law barring the national security staff from engaging in covert operations; tougher criminal penalties for lying to Congress or evading legal restrictions; taking the CIA out of policy-making; Senate confirmation for the White House chief of staff and the national security adviser. These steps make sense. Some political experts have proposed amending the Constitution to permit impeachment of the president for loss of the confidence of Congress—not only for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” as mentioned in the Constitution. But that seems an invitation to troublemaking, especially with the frequent partisan divisions of government.
There is, however, one constitutional step worth considering: introducing a practice akin to “question time” in the British Parliament, where the prime minister is confronted by the Opposition. The idea
would be to require the president to answer questions periodically before Congress, say once a month, as a means of institutionalizing presidential accountability before the elected representatives of the people. Such a political dialogue would be better than press conferences, which are irregular and lack the weight of elected leaders questioning or debating the chief executive. In good political times, regular presidential appearances could improve the links between the White House and Capitol Hill, reminding each side of the power they share. Such a practice would have the added benefit of forcing a president to be more knowledgeable and engaged than Reagan and of forcing the congressional opposition to be more organized and to speak through one or two recognized leaders.
But political retribution is probably the most pragmatic antidote to abuses of power. After the Iran-
contra
operation was exposed, Congress moved to regain lost power. The political pain for Reagan of the prolonged Iran-
contra
hearings and the prospect of tighter laws was intended as a deterrent to future adventurism. That had been a motive for the Watergate prosecutions, though sadly the memory of Watergates’s excesses and punishments wore thin, evidently forgotten by some on Reagan’s staff. The popular drift away from the Republican party in 1987, in reaction to the Iran-
contra
affair, was another penalty. Of course, impeachment is the ultimate sanction. But at bottom, the remedy is self-restraint: an acceptance of the limits of presidential power, the rule of law, and the need for sufficient consensus to sustain a policy without deception or end-running the system.
The Coalition Problem
The more frequent problem in American governance has been not excessive power, but weakness—a weakness not in sheer authority but in the craft of governing. What has been notably missing are political coalitions durable and steady enough to sustain policy for several years and to give continuity and direction to our government: a broadly accepted framework for taming the budget deficit without endless blame-gaming; a long-term strategy for meeting foreign competition without resorting to protectionist wars; a way to modernize our defenses steadily rather than zigzagging between excessive spurts in spending and almost vindictive cutbacks; a consensus on arms control that supports an incremental progress toward greater safety and nuclear stability through negotiation and sensible deterrence.
The fixation on the presidency of the American public and the media
is so great that little attention is paid to the fact that the essence of governing is coalition making. This means looking beyond the White House for solutions. The task is harder now than in earlier eras, because of the power earthquake in Congress, the balkanizing impact of special interests, the weakened structure of political parties, the lack of a majority party, and divided government born of massive split-ticket voting. These problems are not related to one administration, one presidency, one set of political characters. They are enduring problems that have fed popular frustration for the past two decades.
What is needed are measures to give presidents more power to pull together governing alliances in Congress, to increase the cohesive force of political parties, to reduce the prospects of partisan-divided government, and to promote more collaboration across party lines. The two-hundredth anniversary of the Constitution in 1987 spawned an unusual number of reform proposals. Some dramatic reforms were put forward in January 1987 by the Committee on the Constitutional System, a prestigious group of former cabinet officials from four administrations, former and current senators and members of Congress, scholars, and private citizens.
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OPTION 1: SYNCHRONIZED TERMS
Their option 1 was to amend the Constitution to fix four-year terms for House members and eight-year terms for senators. The idea was to have members of Congress run for election only in the same years as presidents, in order to build closer partisan cohesion between president and Congress. In short, they proposed eliminating midterm elections on grounds that these elections pull the branches of government apart and work against presidential leadership. It is true that the president’s party has historically lost strength in Congress in the midterm elections, and even his own party members often pull away from the White House as the midterm elections approach. Moreover, with fewer elections, the committee reasoned, president and Congress could focus more on the work of government and on longer-term solutions to major issues, free of House preoccupation with campaigning every two years.