Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Can I trouble you for a Parliament? A Modest Proposal on Reforming the Presidency

Something I thought of while writing another post: George Bush effectively lost the confidence of his base and party when the immigration bill failed. He lost the ability to accomplish anything in office, and for the last year and a half of his term he's basically just killing time until his term ends. Does this make sense to anyone? It's a major shortcoming of our constitutional system--rulers that have lost the confidence of the people can remain in office for years without having the political capital or resources to address the crises of the day. In the pre-New Deal era, this wasn't a problem, since it was not incumbent upon Presidents to worry about such stuff. You could work for three hours a day, like Woodrow Wilson did for much of his term in office, and catch everything. Presidents didn't try to get their legislation passed through congress, didn't infringe upon the cabinet departments' prerogatives with things like the Council of Economic Advisers, etc. Presidents had foreign policy autonomy, for the most part, and that was about it. It was about all they needed to have, too, since their responsibilities kinda ended there, and there was the Monroe Doctrine to consider.

Things have changed, as we all know. I'm starting to think that the parliamentary system is a better way to go for governance in this day and age. At this point, the utility of allowing Bush his full second term seems equivalent to keeping a comatose patient alive by extraordinarily expensive means with the knowledge that he'll never wake--it's just a waste of time and resources that could better be used elsewhere. Had Bush lost a confidence vote after immigration, the GOP would have had the opportunity to install someone else -- at least there would have been a shot that fresh leadership that had the confidence of his party that might well have been able to deal with some of the crises of the day and try to rebound from the morass in which the GOP found themselves. Instead, thanks to an outmoded constitution written in a much less government-intensive and much slower-paced time, both conservatives and liberals have to have the Bush presidency unnecessarily prolonged.

Adopting a new model of the presidency is essential to this new(ish) era. We need effective leadership to deal with crises as they develop, and allowing the Presidency to function as an emeritus position for failed leaders simply doesn't cut it. My idea is as follows: keep the same four-year term for a president, but allow a party to remove an incumbent president if half the party's congressional delegation (both House and Senate), in a closed session, votes for a change of leadership. The party would then be able to select a new leader that would be able to serve without a plebiscite until the next congressional election. So, if George W. Bush had been removed under this provision and replaced with, say, Rick Santorum (horrors!), we would only have had to suffer through President Sant...(I can't bring myself to write it) for a year and a half. But if the GOP had decided to axe Bush a year into his term--say, after his disastrous Social Security reform proposal failed. The GOP might have had him replaced with the (then) non-radioactive-to-Republicans John McCain--we would have had a special Presidential election in 2006 to confirm that selection. This election would not preempt the regularly scheduled 2008 Presidential Election. So, under this scenario, McCain would have had about three years in office as of 2008 and he would be able to run for one more term, as he would have served more than two years of someone else's presidency. So, about seven years altogether for McCain. As can be seen, the changes to the constitution would need only be minimal, and the present term limit structure could be kept. The Santorum Administration could have more time in office, up to about nine and a half years. This, too, corresponds to the constitution, as the 22nd Amendment allows a president to serve more than two terms if the President serves less than two years of another president's term. So, Sanny would have served more time in office than any president since FDR. There's a scary thought...

And there is that frightening element to it--what, just allow a party to pick a president? It seems just, so, un-American, doesn't it? But it need not be that scary. A party that has lost confidence in its leader would be able to choose a new one--either as a caretaker or as an incumbent to run again. In the latter case, picking someone acceptable to the public at large would be desirable, as picking an unlikeable wingnut would mean certain defeat in the upcoming elections. This is why Rick Santorum wouldn't be selected. And as to the undemocratic nature of the thing--well, it is possible to become president without being elected as it stands now, is it not? A selected president, chosen by his (or her) party to replace an unpopular president, would also have enormous pressure to face the crises that the leader failed to address, as their status as an unelected (and unaccomplished) chief executive would inevitably be an enormous boon to the opposition party in the upcoming elections. Additionally, such an ordinance would greatly enhance the power of the power of congress over the president, which has become unbalanced in the wrong direction, I fear.

Now, there are problems with this proposal. Parties would become much stronger, and a president that bucked their party's positions might be removed for no valid reason. I submit that replacing a popular, heterodox president with an orthodox one would probably not be a winning move for a political party that wants to hang onto their power for more than two years. In any event, that is not the problem that occurs very often these days, is it? Base politics is the most common paradigm at this point, and politicians are unlikely to merely ignore the base these days. Admittedly, George W. Bush's immigration proposal was a defection from his base, and that is the key point of this essay. Does this not undermine my whole argument? Not at all. When a defection from orthodoxy damages the confidence of the president's political party in their leader's ability to move forward, it ought to be their prerogative to choose whether or not to stick with him. It does not necessarily follow that they will choose to remove him. As Bush is still popular among the GOP in general, indeed, they might not have done so. And to the extent that the right wing is hesitant to give the left what they want in removing Bush, it does not seem likely that they would have allowed them a "victory" like this. That choosing to keep an unpopular leader in place just to spite the opposition is the prevailing (and quite shortsighted) calculus reflects more on the polarization of the moment and less on the wisdom of the plan. This reflects the need to keep the process behind closed doors. What could be less democratic than that? Well, coming out against your party's leader is difficult to do in public. In private, members could freely voice their grievances. Parties select their congressional leadership by secret ballot, after all.

This does beg the question: does this mean radically changing the nature of the presidency to a much more party-centric model? In theory, it certainly does. In practice, it does not. The presidency is unquestionably a partisan at this point, but our constitution still lags two centuries behind the times when it comes to defining a role for political parties. The founders, as we all know, were largely opposed to political parties. They assumed, rather arrogantly, that parties would never form just because they didn't want them to. This oversight ought to be corrected, but that is another discussion altogether. In reality, since the early 19th century, presidents have effectively served at the pleasure of their respective parties. But the concern is well-taken, so I would be willing to stipulate a mechanism to provide a check on the power of orthodoxy--allow the removal request to go before both houses of congress. If two-thirds of the members of both houses vote to retain the president, the president would be retained. In this way we create a balance in this removal doctrine between a party's need to unload a disastrous leader, while purely ideological differences between a leader and his party would not necessarily be the end of a presidency, in practical terms as well as in concrete terms.

The result of all this is another check on the office of the presidency, whose power has grown to a far greater extent than the framers might have imagined. In the much more fast-paced world and president-centered government of the United States of America, we no longer have the luxury of presidents who lack the potential to accomplish their goals. To this end, I submit to you a new way of thinking about how to remove a president from office that does not involve impeachment, does not threaten a party change in the presidency, and ultimately fixes a long-persisting but progressively more urgent problem in our government today.