An old master, and other political essays

by Woodrow Wilson

The really subordinate position of the presidency is hidden from view partly by that dignity which is imparted to the office by its conspicuous place at the front of a great government, and its security and definiteness of tenure; partly by the independence apparently secured to it by its erection into an entirely distinct and separate ‘branch’ of the government; and partly by those circumstances of our history which have thrust our Presidents forward, during one or two notable periods, as real originators of policy and leaders in affairs. The President has never been powerful, however, except at such times as he has had Congress at his back. While the new government was a-making—and principally because it was a-making—Washington and his secretaries were looked to by Congress for guidance; and during the presidencies of several of Washington’s immediate successors the continued prominence of questions of foreign policy and of financial management kept the officers of the government in a position of semi-leadership. Jackson was masterful with or without right. He entered upon his presidency as he entered upon his campaign in Florida, without asking too curiously for constitutional warrant for what he was to undertake. In the settlement of the southern question Congress went for a time on all-fours with the President. He was powerful because Congress was acquiescent.

But such cases prove rather the usefulness than the strength of the presidency. Congress has, at several very grave crises in national affairs, been seasonably supplied with an energetic leader or agent in the person of the President. At other times, when Congress was in earnest in pushing views not shared by the President, our executives have either been overwhelmed, as Johnson was, or have had to decline upon much humbler services. Their negotiations with foreign governments are as likely to be disapproved as approved; their budgets are cut down like a younger son’s portion; their appointments are censured and their administrations criticised without chance for a counter-hearing. They create nothing. Their veto is neither revisory nor corrective. It is merely obstructive. It is, as I have said, a simple blunt negation, oftentimes necessarily spoken without discrimination against a good bill because of a single bad clause in it. In such a contest between origination and negation origination must always win, or government must stand still.

In England the veto of the Crown has not passed out of use, as is commonly said. It has simply changed its form. It does not exist as an imperative, obstructive ‘No,’ uttered by the sovereign. It has passed over into the privilege of the ministers to throw their party weight, reinforced by their power to dissolve Parliament, against measures of which they disapprove. It is a much-tempered instrument, but for that reason all the more flexible and useful. The old, blunt, antagonistic veto is no longer needed. It is needed here, however, to preserve the presidency from the insignificance of merely administrative functions. Since executive and legislature cannot come into relations of mutual confidence and co-operation, the former must be put in a position to maintain a creditable competition for consideration and dignity.

A clear-headed, methodical, unimaginative President like Mr. Cleveland unaffectedly recognizes the fact that all creating, originating power rests with Congress, and that he can do no more than direct the details of such projects as he finds commended by its legislation. The suggestions of his message he acknowledges to be merely suggestions, which must depend upon public opinion for their weight. If Congress does not regard them, it must reckon with the people, not with him. It is his duty to tell Congress what he thinks concerning the pending questions of the day; it is not his duty to assume any responsibility for the effect produced on Congressmen.

The English have transformed their Crown into a Ministry, and in doing so have recognized both the supremacy of Parliament and the rôle of leadership in legislation properly belonging to a responsible executive. The result has been that they have kept a strong executive without abating either the power or the independence of the representative chamber in respect of its legislative function. We, on the contrary, have left our executive separate, as the Constitution made it; chiefly, it is to be suspected, because the explicit and confident gifts of function contained in that positive instrument have blinded us by their very positiveness to the real subordination of the executive resulting from such a separation. We have supposed that our President was great because his powers were specific, and that our Congress was not supreme because it could not lay its hands directly upon his office and turn him out. In fact, neither the dignity and power of the executive nor the importance of Congress is served by the arrangement. Being held off from authoritative suggestion in legislation, the President becomes, under ordinary circumstances, merely a ministerial officer; whilst Congress, on its part, deprived of such leadership, becomes a legislative mass meeting instead of a responsible co-operating member of a well-organized government. Being under the spell of the Constitution, we have been unable to see the facts which written documents can neither establish nor change.

Singularly enough, there is sharp opposition to the introduction into Congress of any such leadership on the part of the executive as the Ministers of the Crown enjoy in Parliament, on the ground of the increase of power which would accrue as a result to the legislature. It is said that such a change would, by centring party and personal responsibility in Congress, give too great a prominence to legislation; would make Congress the object of too excited an interest on the part of the people. Legislation in Parliament, instead of being piecemeal, tessellated work, such as is made up in Congress of the various fragments contributed by the standing committees, is, under each ministry, a continuous, consistent, coherent whole; and, instead of bearing the sanction of both national parties, is the peculiar policy of only one of them. It is thought that, if such coherence of plan, definiteness and continuity of aim, and sanction of party were to be given the work of Congress, the resulting concentration of popular interest and opinion would carry Congress over all the barriers of the Constitution to an undisputed throne of illimitable power. In short, the potential supremacy of Congress is thought to be kept within bounds, not by the constitutional power of the executive and the judiciary, its co-ordinate branches, but by the intrinsic dulness and confusion of its own proceedings. It cannot make itself interesting enough to be great.

But this is a two-edged argument, which one must needs handle with great caution. It is evidently calculated to destroy every argument constructed on the assumption that it is written laws which are effective to the salvation of our constitutional arrangements; for it is itself constructed on the opposite assumption, that it is the state of popular interest in the nation which balances the forces of the government. It would, too, serve with equal efficacy against any scheme whatever for reforming the present methods of legislation in Congress, with which almost everybody is dissatisfied. Any reform which should tend to give to national legislation that uniform, open, intelligent, and responsible character which it now lacks, would also create that popular interest in the proceedings of Congress which, it is said, would unhinge the Constitution. Democracy is so delicate a form of government that it must break down if given too great facility or efficacy of operation. No one body of men must be suffered to utter the voice of the people, lest that voice become, through it, directly supreme.

The fact of the overtopping power of Congress, however, remains. The houses create all governmental policy, with that wide latitude of ‘political discretion’ in the choice of means which the Supreme Court unstintingly accords them. Congress has often come into conflict with the Supreme Court by attempting to extend the province of the federal government as against the States; but it has seldom, I believe, been brought effectually to book for any alleged exercise of powers as against its directly competing branch, the executive. Having by constitutional grant the last word as to foreign relations, the control of the finances, and even the oversight of executive appointments, Congress exercises what powers of direction and management it pleases, as fulfilling, not as straining, the Constitution. Government lives in the origination, not in the defeat, of measures of government. The President obstructs by means of his ‘No;’ the houses govern by means of their ‘Yes.’ He has killed some policies that are dead; they have given birth to all policies that are alive.

But the measures born in Congress have no common lineage. They have not even a traceable kinship. They are fathered by a score or two of unrelated standing committees: and Congress stands godfather to them all, without discrimination. Congress, in effect, parcels out its great powers amongst groups of its members, and so confuses its plans and obscures all responsibility. It is a leading complaint of Sir Henry Maine’s against the system in England, which is just under his nose, that it confers the preliminary shaping and the initiation of all legislation upon the cabinet, a body which deliberates and resolves in strict secrecy,—and so reminds him, remotely enough, of the Spartan Ephors and the Venetian Council of Ten. He commends, by contrast, that constitution (our own, which he sees at a great distance) which reserves to the legislature itself the origination and drafting of its measures. It is hard for us, who have this commended constitution under our noses, to perceive wherein we have the advantage. British legislation is for the most part originated and shaped by a single committee, acting in secret, whose proposals, when produced, are eagerly debated and freely judged by the sovereign legislative body. Our legislation is framed and initiated by a great many committees, deliberating in secret, whose proposals are seldom debated and only perfunctorily judged by the sovereign legislative body. It is impossible to mistake the position and privileges of the Brutish cabinet, so great and conspicuous and much discussed are they. They simplify the whole British system for men’s comprehension by merely standing at the centre of it. But our own system is simple only in appearance. It is easy to see that our legislature and executive are separate, and that the legislature matures its own measures by means of committees of its own members. But it may readily escape superficial observation that our legislature, instead of being served, is ruled by its committees; that those committees prepare their measures in private; that their number renders their privacy a secure secrecy, by making them too many to be watched, and individually too insignificant to be worth watching; that their division of prerogatives results in a loss, through diffusion, of all actual responsibility; and that their co-ordination leads to such a competition among them for the attention of their respective houses that legislation is rushed, when it is not paralyzed.

It is thus that, whilst all real power is in the hands of Congress, that power is often thrown out of gear and its exercise brought almost to a standstill. The competition of the committees is the clog. Their reports stand in the way of each other, and so the complaint is warranted that Congress can get nothing done. Interests which press for attention in the nation are reported upon by the appropriate committee, perhaps, but the report gets pushed to the wall. Or they are not reported upon. They are brought to the notice of Congress, but they go to a committee which is unfavorable. The progress of legislation depends both upon the fortunes of competing reports and upon the opinions held by particular committees.