Author Topic: The President Shouldn’t Set Congress’s Legislative Agenda  (Read 323 times)

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Offline EasyAce

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That's not his job
By Max Bloom
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/448923/print

Quote
‘The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few,
or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny,”
James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 48. Montesquieu, quoted therein, warned that “when the legislative and executive
powers are united in the same person or body, there can be no liberty, because apprehensions may arise lest the same
monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws to execute them in a tyrannical manner.”

Madison and Montesquieu are perhaps not much remembered today. Separation of powers, once celebrated as a hallmark
of the American experiment, is decidedly out of fashion. Our system delegates lawmaking to Congress, implementation
to the executive, and the resolution of disputes to the courts, but there is a clamor to have it otherwise — everyone wants
his preferred policies enacted and no one really trusts Congress with the job, so what does it matter if our constitutional
order goes out the window in the service of a creative solution? . . .

. . . If the point of politics is to get your preferred policy implemented, consequences be damned, and your party controls
the White House, it is useful to have the president’s allies in Congress act primarily as a voting bloc for his proposals. The
president commands an immense amount of authority and prestige — far more, generally, than congressional leaders —
and so will have an easier time unifying the party and mobilizing the electorate. Moreover, he is concerned about his
legacy and insulated from many of the petty congressional preoccupations that have always bothered Americans — the
frequent pace of elections, the need to forge long-term relationships, the pet projects, the local constituents — so his
proposals tend to be more ambitious and more inspiring. This is why liberals were so unperturbed by Obama’s involvement
in the legislative process, and it is why many conservatives have been frustrated by Trump’s failure to help guide
Republican lawmaking.

But think of Madison and Montesquieu. Though their concerns may seem idealistic now, in our age of partisan warfare,
it’s worth remembering that the Constitution already disposes to the president a tremendous amount of power. The power
to enforce the laws carries with it a great enough potential for abuse; it is downright dangerous to gift the president the
power to write the laws as well . . .

. . . Whenever the president effectively writes a piece of legislation and Congress dutifully passes it, the natural competition
between the two branches erodes slightly and they began to view each other more as allies than as distinct political units
working in tension with each other. It is a worrisome commentary on the condition of American politics that many pundits
have begun to ignore this tension completely and view, say, House Republicans as the policymaking wing of the Trump
administration.

This is not to say, of course, that there is no room for coordination between the OMB and the Senate over tax reform, or that
Trump’s lack of interest in mastering the details of health-care reform is healthy. The president will naturally be involved in
policymaking to some degree, the executive branch can offer useful guidance to lawmakers, and parties must coordinate
their actions internally. But it is no tragedy that the path to health-care reform so far has been navigated by Paul Ryan and
Mitch McConnell rather than by Trump.

It’s just the proper way of things.


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