SENATOR JAMES E. WATSON OF INDIANA
The question what is the matter with Congress has received more answers than any other question asked about American institutions. For almost a generation the national legislature has been regarded as the one great failure in self government. For years it has been the home of small men concerned with petty things which it approached in a petty spirit, incompetent, wasteful, and hypocritical, a trial to the Executive, almost a plague to the country. It has shared with state legislatures and municipal boards of aldermen the impatience of the people. In spite of searchings of the public conscience it has gone from bad to worse till it is at its lowest point today, in personnel, in organization, in capacity to transact business.
What has brought Congress to this state has been the unimportance of its work, "doing such little things," as Mr. Root said after his six years in the Senate. Natural economy prevents the sending of a man on a boy's errand even if the man would go.
The great power which legislatures have, that over the public purse, has not been of enough importance to make Congress a great legislature. Taxes were light and before the war fell so indirectly that the public gave them little attention. The control of the budget virtually passed out of the hands of Congress, for executive departments habitually exceeded their appropriations and Congress always made up the deficiencies. There was no tax upon incomes. Taxpayers were indifferent. A few hundred millions more or less was of no account.
Dispensations to business in the shape of protective duties upon imports, a form of taxation which once made Congress a dominant factor in national life, had become steadily less important as American industry grew strong enough to hold its own market against competition and to compete itself in other markets. With the subsidence of the tariff as an issue Congress lost its last power to impose taxes in which the country was deeply interested. Where the control of the public purse and taxes are unimportant, legislatures are weak, unless executive authority is vested in a Cabinet formed from among their members.
With the enfeeblement of Congress through the growing unimportance of the taxing power, its great function, came the tendency to magnify the Executive. Power has to go somewhere, and it went down Pennsylvania Avenue. And this movement coincided with the development of centralization. Congress, which was full of the spirit of localism, was not a perfect instrument of centralization. The Executive was.