In Defense of Public Service by Cedric L. Alexander

Author:Cedric L. Alexander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2020-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

•

DEMOCRACY DEFAULTS to COMPETENCE, and COMPETENCE DEFAULTS to MODERATION

Divided government is often called the genius of American democracy. The framers of the Constitution conceived a system of three coequal branches of government as a means of thwarting the growth of tyranny by preventing any one branch or individual in government from accumulating too much power. Congress is a check on the president, and the president, who has the power of the veto and the authority to issue executive orders, is a check on Congress. The Judicial Branch, armed with judicial review, is a constitutional check on the other two branches. Yet the Judicial Branch is not given the power to appoint its own federal judges and justices. That is reserved to the president, subject, however, to the advice and consent of the Senate.

Until the highly partisan rule changes of 2013 and 2017, the Senate traditionally had another check-and-balance role. A rule long in force required a three-fifths supermajority to move a vote through a motion of cloture to end (“close”) debate on a bill or a nomination. Cloture ends a minority filibuster and thereby allows the issue at hand to be brought to a straight-up, simple majority vote. Under the traditional rule, the mere threat of a filibuster would prevent passage of any measure, including presidential appointments, that had less than three-fifths agreement—sixty out of one hundred senators. On the one hand, this could be quite frustrating, especially for those who believe that if a little democracy is good, a lot of democracy is better. On the other hand, the rule allowed the Senate to serve in the role intended by the framers. George Washington reputedly explained to Thomas Jefferson that the authors of the Constitution created the Senate (whose members at the time were not chosen by direct popular election) to “cool” legislation passed by the House (whose members were directly elected by the people). Washington compared the Senate to a saucer used to cool hot tea.1 The deliberative Senate provided second thought to the decisions of the legislative chamber believed to be more inherently impulsive.

In 2013, Democratic senate majority leader Harry Reid used a parliamentary maneuver dubbed the “nuclear option” to override the supermajority cloture rule in the case of Senate approval of presidential nominations at a time when Democrat Barack Obama occupied the White House. Reid, however, drew the line at Supreme Court nominations, excluding these from the override. In 2017, during the Republican Trump administration, Republican senate majority leader Mitch McConnell used what was now his majority to extend the nuclear option to Supreme Court nominations, which allowed President Trump to win Senate approval of his very conservative nominees to the Supreme Court.2

Although a three-fifths Senate supermajority is still required to end debates on legislation, the changes in the Senate rules governing advice and consent to all presidential nominations have significantly reduced that body’s “cooling-saucer” influence. Even more significantly, Congress, which was constitutionally conceived as a power to countervail the power of the president—whose own

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.