1Sam 8v18to20 US Elective Monarchy J:)
1Sa
8:18-20 KJV And
ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen
you; and the LORD will not hear you in that day. (19) Nevertheless
the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay; but we will
have a king over us; (20) That we also may be like all the nations; and
that
our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.
Excerpt from: The Presidency Has Turned Into an 'Elective Monarchy':
First off, we're hardly "the freest country in the
world." As Buckley points out, his native Canada beats the United
States handily on most cross-country comparisons of political and economic
liberty. In the latest edition of the Cato Institute's Economic Freedom of the
World rankings, for example, we're number 17 and we don't try harder.
Meanwhile, as Buckley points out, the Economist Intelligence Unit's
"Democracy Index" ranks us as the 19th healthiest democracy in the
world, "behind a group of mostly parliamentary countries, and not very
far ahead of the 'flawed democracies.'"
There's a lesson there, Buckley argues. While
"an American is apt to think that his Constitution uniquely protects
liberty," the truth "is almost exactly the reverse." In a series
of regressions using the Freedom House rankings, Buckley finds that
"presidentialism is significantly and strongly correlated with less
political freedom." [My emphasis.]
The
Presidency Has Turned Into an 'Elective Monarchy' A conservative legal scholar's surprisingly
convincing case against the Constitution. Gene Healy | July 5, 2014 -
Reason.com http://bit.ly/1mnjjPJ
The Once and Future King: The
Rise of Crown Government in America, by F.H. Buckley, Encounter Books, 2014, 319 pages, $27.99.| Amazon.com:
Books http://amzn.to/TSvOro
Try making sense out of what Americans tell
pollsters. According to the Pew Research Center, fewer than one in five of us
trusts the federal government. Gallup says that nearly three quarters of us
consider it "the biggest threat to the country in the future." Yet by
equally overwhelming margins, Gallup shows Americans agreeing that "the
United States has a unique character because of its history and Constitution
that sets it apart from other nations as the greatest in the world."
Apparently, we're disgusted and frightened by
our government as it actually operates. And yet we're convinced that we've got
the best system ever devised by the mind of man.
On both counts, no one's more convinced than
American conservatives. Few go quite as far toward constitutional idolatry as
former House Majority Leader Tom Delay, who earlier this year proclaimed that
God "wrote the Constitution." But the superiority of our national
charter, with its separation of powers and independently elected national
executive, is an article of faith for conservatives.
It's about time for some constitutional impiety
on the right, and F.H. Buckley answers the call in his bracing and important
new book, The Once and Future King. Buckley, a professor of law at George Mason
University and a senior editor at The American Spectator, is unmistakably
conservative. But that doesn't stop him from pointing out that America's not so
all-fired exceptional—or from arguing that our Constitution has made key
contributions to our national decline.
In the conventional narrative, Buckley writes,
"our thanks [must] go to the Framers, who gave the country a presidential
system that secured the blessings of liberty." A "nice story,"
he says, but one that "lacks the added advantage of accuracy."
First off, we're hardly "the freest
country in the world." As Buckley points out, his native Canada beats the
United States handily on most cross-country comparisons of political and
economic liberty. In the latest edition of the Cato Institute's Economic
Freedom of the World rankings, for example, we're number 17 and we don't try
harder. Meanwhile, as Buckley points out, the Economist Intelligence Unit's
"Democracy Index" ranks us as the 19th healthiest democracy in the
world, "behind a group of mostly parliamentary countries, and not very far
ahead of the 'flawed democracies.'"
There's a lesson there, Buckley argues. While
"an American is apt to think that his Constitution uniquely protects
liberty," the truth "is almost exactly the reverse." In a series
of regressions using the Freedom House rankings, Buckley finds that
"presidentialism is significantly and strongly correlated with less
political freedom."
In this, he builds on the work of the late
political scientist Juan Linz, who in a pioneering 1990 article, "The
Perils of Presidentialism," argued that presidential systems encourage
cults of personality, foster instability, and are especially bad for developing
countries. Subsequent studies have bolstered Linz's insights, showing that
presidential systems are more prone to corruption than parliamentary systems,
more likely to suffer catastrophic breakdowns, and more likely to degenerate
into autocracies. Buckley puts it succinctly: "there are a good many more
presidents-for-life than prime-ministers-for-life." Maybe what's
exceptional about the United States, he suggests, is that for more than 200
years we've "remained free while yet presidential."
Relatively free, that is. The American
presidency, with its vast regulatory and national security powers, is, Buckley
argues, rapidly degenerating into the "elective monarchy" George
Mason warned about at the Philadelphia Convention. Despite their parliamentary
systems, our cousins in the Anglosphere also suffer from creeping "Crown
Government": "political power has been centralized in the executive
branch of government in America, Britain, and Canada, like a virus that attacks
different people, with different constitutions, in different countries at the
same time."
But we've got it worse, thanks in large part to
a system that makes us particularly susceptible to one-man rule. As Buckley
sees it, "presidentialism fosters the rise of Crown government" in
several distinct ways. Among them: It encourages executive messianism by making
the head of government the head of state; it insulates the head of government
from legislative accountability; and it makes him far harder to remove. On each
of these points, The Once and Future King makes a compelling—and compellingly
readable—case.
"The character of the presidency is
such," the British journalist Henry Fairlie wrote in 1967, "that the
majority of the people can be persuaded to look to it for a kind of leadership
which no politician, in my opinion, should be allowed, let alone invited, to
give. 'If people want a sense of purpose,' [former British Prime Minister]
Harold Macmillan once said to me, 'they should get it from their archbishops.'"
Presidential regimes invite executive dominance
by combining the roles of "head of state" and "head of
government" in one figure. "As heads of government," Buckley
writes, "presidents are the most powerful officials in their countries. As
heads of state, they are also their countries' ceremonial leaders," and
claim "the loyalty and respect of all patriots." Where parliamentary
systems cleave off power from ceremony, presidential ones make the chief
executive the living symbol of nationhood: the focal point of national hopes,
dreams, fears—and occasionally fantasies. In February 2009, author Judith
Warner took to her New York Times blog to confess that "The other night I
dreamt of Barack Obama. He was taking a shower right when I needed to get into
the bathroom to shave my legs." Warner's email inquiries revealed that
"many women—not too surprisingly—were dreaming about sex with the
president."
Buckley notes that "Britons tend not to
chat with David Cameron in their dreams," which presumably rules out soapy
frolicking as well. Nor do Brits tend to look to the PM for a sense of national
purpose or as a cure for spiritual "malaise." Prime ministers are
"more likely to be figures of fun...or the butt of slanging matches during
Question Period in the House of Commons." Indeed, the parliamentary
practice of Prime Minister's Questions, in which the chief executive is
regularly and ruthlessly grilled by the opposition, goes a long way toward
explaining why there's no such thing as the Cult of the Prime Minister.
Presidents can isolate themselves in a cocoon
of sycophants, even putting protesters in "Free-Speech Zones," where
their signs can't offend the liege. And his role as head of state "tends
to make criticism of a president seem like lese-majeste"—as Justice Samuel
Alito learned when he dared mouth the words "not true" while Obama
pummelled the Court in his 2010 State of the Union.
"Thin-skinned and grandiose"
characters do better in presidential regimes, Buckley writes, whereas
"delusions of Gaullist grandeur are fatal for Prime Ministers." In
the UK, they have to face the music in person every week. The aforementioned
Harold Macmillan, British PM from 1957 to '63, admitted that the very prospect
used to make him physically sick.
The PM's Question Time is but one facet of the
superior executive accountability offered by parliamentary systems, Buckley
argues. Such systems, he maintains, also do a better of restraining executives'
proclivity for launching wars.
It's a counterintuitive claim. In the U.K., warmaking
is a royal prerogative exercised by the PM, and parliamentary approval is
optional. In the U.S., Congress has the power to declare war and the power of
the purse, which Jefferson looked to as an "effectual check to the Dog of
war."
That's the theory, anyway. In practice, Buckley
shows, "the absence of the separation of powers in parliamentary regimes
and the government's day-to-day accountability before the House of Commons make
it far more difficult for a prime minister to disregard Parliament's wishes."
Meanwhile, U.S. congressmen reliably punt on questions of war and peace and
hardly ever object to funding wars they never approved.
Buckley over-eggs the pudding a bit when he
writes that "if one really wants a militaristic government and imperialism,
presidential regimes are the way to go." The British Empire managed well
enough, having at one time or another made war on all but 22 countries around
the world.
Even so, our countries' respective debates over
whether to bomb Syria made for an instructive contrast. Last September,
Secretary of State John Kerry kept insisting that "the president has the
power" to wage war "no matter what Congress does." When the
House of Commons rejected airstrikes, Kerry's counterpart across the pond
simply said, "Parliament has spoken."
Finally, parliamentary systems do better on the
ultimate question of accountability: They make it easier to "throw the bum
out" if all else fails. "Prime ministers may be turfed out at any
time by a majority in the House of Commons"; they can also be replaced by
their party without bringing down the government. Presidents serve for fixed
terms, and since we've never, in 225 years, successfully used the impeachment
process to remove one, anyone who's not demonstrably crazy or catatonic gets to
ride out his term. We're stuck with the guy, thanks to our peculiar system of
separated powers.
That system isn't all it's cracked up to be.
It's not even what the Framers wanted, Buckley argues. Madison's Virginia Plan
featured an executive chosen by the legislature. The Framers repeatedly
rejected the idea of a president elected by the people—that option failed in
four separate votes in Philadelphia.
What they envisioned was something much closer
to parliamentarianism. As the Convention drew to a close, most of the Framers
thought they'd settled on a system where presidential selection would usually
be thrown to the House, since, after Washington, they didn't expect
"national candidates with countrywide support would emerge." It was
only after the Convention that Madison became the "principal
apologist" for the emerging system of strong separation of powers.
Buckley is relentless in cataloging that
system's defects. It's made the executive the most dangerous branch, he writes,
fostering one-man rule when "deadlocks produced by divided
government...encourage a power-seeking president to disregard the legislature
and rule by decree."
Still, is there anything that separationism is
good for? It stands to reason that the lack of separated powers in parliamentary
regimes makes it easier to get big, bad things done.
Buckley acknowledges the point, but counters
that it's also easier to get them undone, and that with a fiscal apocalypse
looming, reversibility is more important. That's a plausible thesis, but I'd have
liked to see more actual evidence on how well parliamentary regimes do at
repealing bad laws and bad programs.
Buckley also spends comparatively little time
on the relationship between regime choice and size of government. He notes that
in the '90s, presidential regimes had lower per-capita spending than
parliamentary ones, but "since then, the gap has narrowed
considerably...and this is before the bill for Obamacare comes due." But
the U.S. still spends less on average than other wealthy democracies, including
most first-world parliamentary regimes. And as far as "the bill for
Obamacare" goes: Without the separation of powers, there's little doubt
the U.S. would have had nationalized health care long before 2009. As Yale's
Theodore Marmor, a leading scholar on the politics of the welfare state, argued
in Social Science & Medicine in 2011, if the U.S. "had a
Westminster-style parliamentary system, it is likely that America would have
adopted national health insurance over 60 years ago when President Harry Truman
proposed it."
Some scholars have found that presidential
systems' apparent advantage on government expenditures vanish under close
scrutiny. But even if the tradeoff is higher government spending in exchange
for somewhat greater freedom and a more restrained and accountable chief
executive, it's not a trade we have the power to make. "All of this is
irreversible," Buckley warns the reader in the book's very first chapter.
In the last chapter, he notes that it's "a bit late in the day to adopt
the parliamentary form of government the Framers had wanted," before
half-heartedly outlining a few reforms he admits won't solve the fundamental
problem.
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I2C 140709aa 1Sa 8v18to20 Popular king / | I2C | 140709 0943 |
