An old master, and other political essays

by Woodrow Wilson

The same system of committee government prevails in our state legislatures, and has led to some notable results, which have recently been pointed out in a pamphlet entitled American Constitutions, contributed to the Johns Hopkins series of Studies in History and Political Science by Mr. Horace Davis. In the state legislatures, as in Congress, the origination and control of legislation by standing committees has led to haphazard, incoherent, irresponsible law-making, and to a universal difficulty about getting anything done. The result has been that state legislatures have been falling into disrepute in all quarters. They are despised and mistrusted, and many States have revised their constitutions in order to curtail legislative powers and limit the number and length of legislative sessions. There is in some States an apparent inclination to allow legislators barely time enough to provide moneys for the maintenance of the governments. In some instances necessary powers have been transferred from the legislatures to the courts; in others to the governors. The intent of all such changes is manifest. It is thought safer to entrust power to a law court, performing definite functions under clear laws and in accordance with strict judicial standards, or to a single conspicuous magistrate, who can be watched and cannot escape responsibility for his official acts, than to entrust it to a numerous body which burrows toward its ends in committee-rooms, getting its light through lobbies; and which has a thousand devices for juggling away responsibility, as well as scores of antagonisms wherewith to paralyze itself.

Like fear and distrust have often been felt and expressed of late years concerning Congress, for like reasons. But so far no attempt has been made to restrict either the powers or the time of Congress. Amendments to the Constitution are difficult almost to the point of impossibility, and the few definite schemes nowadays put forward for a revision of the Constitution involve extensions rather than limitations of the powers of Congress. The fact is that, though often quite as exasperating to sober public opinion as any state legislature, Congress is neither so much distrusted nor so deserving of distrust. Its high place and vast sphere in the government of the nation cause its members to be more carefully chosen, and its proceedings to be more closely watched, and frequently controlled by criticism. The whole country has its eyes on Congress, and Congress is aware of the fact. It has both the will and the incentive to be judicious and patriotic. Newspaper editors have constantly to be saying to their readers, ‘Look what our state legislators are doing;’ they seldom have to urge, ‘Look what Congress is doing.’ It cannot, indeed, be watched easily, or to much advantage. It requires a distinct effort to watch it. It has no dramatic contests of party leaders to attract notice. Its methods are so much after the fashion of the game of hide-and-seek that the eye of the ordinary man is quite baffled in trying to understand or follow them, if he try only at leisure moments. But, at the same time, the interests handled by Congress are so vast that at least the newspapers and the business men, if no others, must watch its legislation as best they may. However hard it may be to observe, it is too influential in great affairs to make it safe for the country to give over trying to observe it.

But though Congress may always be watched, and so in a measure controlled, despite its clandestine and confusing methods, those methods must tend to increase the distrust with which Congress is widely regarded; and distrust cannot but enervate, belittle, and corrupt this will-centre of the Constitution. The question is not merely, How shall the methods of Congress be clarified and its ways made purposeful and responsible? There is this greater question at stake: How shall the essential arrangements of the Constitution be preserved? Congress is the purposing, designing, aggressive power of the national government. Disturbing and demoralizing influences in the organism, if there be any, come out from its restless energies. Damaging encroachments upon ground forbidden to the federal government generally originate in measures of its planning. So long as it continues to be governed by unrelated standing committees, and to take its resolves in accordance with no clear plan, no single, definite purpose, so long as what it does continues to be neither evident nor interesting, so long must all its exertions of power be invidious; so long must its competition with the executive or the judiciary seem merely jealous and always underhand: so long must it remain virtually impossible to control it through public opinion. As well ask the stranger in the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange to judge of the proceedings on the floor. As well ask a man who has not time to read all the newspapers in the Union to judge of passing sentiment in all parts of the country. Congress in its composition is the country in miniature. It realizes Hobbes’s definition of liberty as political power divided into small fragments. The standing committees typify the individuals of the nation. Congress is better fitted for counsel than the voters simply because its members are less than four hundred instead of more than ten millions.

It has been impossible to carry out the programme of the Constitution; and, without careful reform, the national legislature will even more dangerously approach the perilous model of a mass meeting. There are several ways in which Congress can be so integrated as to impart to its proceedings system and party responsibility. That may be done by entrusting the preparation and initiation of legislation to a single committee in each house, composed of the leading men of the majority in that house. Such a change would not necessarily affect the present precedents as to the relations between the executive and the legislature. They might still stand stiffly apart. Congress would be integrated and invigorated, however, though the whole system of the government would not be. To integrate that, some common meeting-ground of public consultation must be provided for the executive and the houses. That can be accomplished only by the admission to Congress, in whatever capacity,—whether simply to answer proper questions and to engage in debate, or with the full privileges of membership,—of official representatives of the executive who understand the administration and are interested and able to defend it. Let the tenure of ministers have what disconnection from legislative responsibility may seem necessary to the preservation of the equality of House and Senate, and the separation of administration from legislation; light would at least be thrown upon administration; it would be given the same advantages of public suggestion and unhampered self-defence that Congress, its competitor, has; and Congress would be constrained to apply system and party responsibility to its proceedings.

The establishment in the United States of what is known as ‘ministerial responsibility’ would unquestionably involve some important changes in our constitutional system. I am strongly of the opinion that such changes would not be too great a price to pay for the advantages secured us by such a government. Ministerial responsibility supplies the only conditions which have yet proved efficacious, in the political experience of the world, for vesting recognized leadership in men chosen for their abilities by a natural selection of debate in a sovereign assembly of whose contests the whole country is witness. Such survival of the ablest in debate seems the only process available for selecting leaders under a popular government. The mere fact that such a contest proceeds with such a result is the strongest possible incentive to men of first-rate powers to enter legislative service; and popular governments, more than any other governments, need leaders so placed that, by direct contact with both the legislative and the executive departments of the government, they shall see the problems of government at first hand; and so trained that they shall at the same time be, not mere administrators, but also men of tact and eloquence, fitted to persuade masses of men and to draw about themselves a loyal following.

If we borrowed ministerial responsibility from England, we should, too, unquestionably enjoy an infinite advantage over the English in the use of it. We should sacrifice by its adoption none of that great benefit and security which our federal system derives from a clear enumeration of powers and an inflexible difficulty of amendment. If anything would be definite under cabinet government, responsibility would be definite; and, unless I am totally mistaken in my estimate of the legal conscience of the people of this country,—which seems to me to be the heart of our whole system,—definite responsibility will establish rather than shake those arrangements of our Constitution which are really our own, and to which our national pride properly attaches, namely, the distinct division of powers between the state and federal governments, the slow and solemn formalities of constitutional change, and the interpretative functions of the federal courts. If we are really attached to these principles, the concentration of responsibility in government will doubly insure their preservation. If we are not, they are in danger of destruction in any case.

But we cannot have ministerial responsibility in its fulness under the Constitution as it stands. The most that we can have is distinct legislative responsibility, with or without any connection of co-operation or of mutual confidence between the executive and Congress. To have so much would be an immense gain. Changes made to this end would leave the federal system still an unwieldy mechanism of counteracting forces, still without unity or flexibility; but we should at least have made the very great advance of fastening upon Congress an even more positive form of accountability than now rests upon the President and the courts. Questions of vast importance and infinite delicacy have constantly to be dealt with by Congress; and there is an evident tendency to widen the range of those questions. The grave social and economic problems now thrusting themselves forward, as the result of the tremendous growth and concentration of our population, and the consequent sharp competition for the means of livelihood, indicate that our system is already aging, and that any clumsiness, looseness, or irresponsibility in governmental action must prove a source of grave and increasing peril. There are already commercial heats and political distempers in our body politic which warn of an early necessity for carefully prescribed physic. Under such circumstances, some measure of legislative reform is clearly indispensable. We cannot afford to put up any longer with such legislation as we may happen upon. We must look and plan ahead. We must have legislation which has been definitely forecast in party programmes and explicitly sanctioned by the public voice. Instead of the present arrangements for compromise, piecemeal legislation, we must have coherent plans from recognized party leaders, and means for holding those leaders to a faithful execution of their plans in clear-cut Acts of Congress.

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