Does Our System Demand Too Much Of The President?
Published: September 29, 2008
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Why do we make such a big deal of the American presidential election every four years? Obviously, the president is the highest executive official of the land. But it is more than that. In our usual federal system, citizens of the whole country get to vote for only one officialy-that’s right, only one: the president of the United States.
All other elected national leaders - the Congress - are chosen by only a few Americans, either the few that reside in each of the 435 congressional districts for the House of Representatives or the few that live in each state, where state-wide elections for the Senate take place.
Think about it for a moment. In a country of 300 million people, the national citizentry has the opportunity to elect only a single public official.
That’s got to be a drag on something. And in fact, it is. It leads us to expect too much of the president because we, as a national citizenry, have no way to demand much of Congress. American citizens altogether elect not a single member of Congress. Therefore, we have to demand and expect everything of the president who has to be all things to all people. That is impossible, of course, and it is made even more impossible by the fact that the president has to work with a Congress that is less and less responsive to the national citizenry and more and more dependent on interest-group brokering, which yields all too little benefit to the common good of the republic as a whole.
To help expose this deficiency in our system I want to draw on a surprising source. Larry Siedentop, an emeritus fellow of Keble College, Oxford, wrote a commentary in the Financial Times (London, 7/2/08) about the democratic deficit in the European Union (EU). He tries to explain why voters in a recent referendum in Ireland, and two yeas ago in France and The Netherlands, turned down the latest EU proposal to strengthen the governance structure of the EU. Listen to what he has to say and then consider with me its relevance for the democratic deficit in our federal republic.
The primary motive of Irish, Dutch, and French voters, says Siedentop, was to express disgruntlement about their lack of meaningful representation in the governance of the European Union whose parliament has little authority. The parliament “has no hold over European opinion, no ability to mobilize or shape consent across the Union.” What has happened over the last two decades or so is that the national parliaments of the EU’s member states have transferred some of their power to the EU executives in Brussels but have not acquired for citizens across the union a genuinely representative parliament with recognized legitimacy. As a consequence, writes Siedentop, a “generalized cynicism about government is on the rise.”
What liberal democracy is all about, he says, is the protection of “equal fundamental rights, equal liberty. The self-respect following from that principle gives citizens a moral foothold, in the form of self-government, that helps to compensate for the inequalities that market freedoms and civil society create.” Without a similar embodiment of that principle in the EU, people lose self-respect and idealism about European integration and their place in it. Simply enjoying certain economic benefits from EU membership is not enough to make up for the lack of self-government.
American polity
Now, think with me about our American situation. Our federal structure is very old, of course, quite unlike the relatively new EU that has been built up from a customs union of six countries only since World War II and is not yet a full-fledged political entity. But actually, the difference in historical time is not all that great. While our federal system has been in place for more than 200 years, it was only with the Great Depression and World War II that the federal government became a major legislator and adjudicator in national life through Social Security and employment policies, through welfare and education policies, through investment in the national highway system and battles against racial discrimination, and through many other programs of subsidy, insurance, investment, criminal and civil justice, and civil rights.
Our states, in other words, which were never sovereign and self-sufficient like the European states once were, nonetheless have, since World War II, ceded much of their formerly independent responsibility for education, health care, marriage and family, land use, resource development, transportation, and insurance to the federal government. This is not necessarily a bad thing in the historical course of national integration and population growth. Americans now live together in a national polity rather than primarily in state polities in loose relation to one another and to a distant federal government.
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