A Republic No More. Jay Cost

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СКАЧАТЬ necessary to implement such programs had not been invented yet. So, once more, regardless of whether our modern welfare regime comports with the ideal of securing a more perfect union, the fact is that the men who signed the Constitution, and the states that ratified it, never anticipated such a state of affairs—and of course did not build institutions meant to handle it effectively.

      Taken together, these powers represent a level of nationalism that was unanticipated in 1787. They have grown over time—sometimes slowly, sometimes in great bursts—as leaders have grappled with public problems. Importantly, the government acquired those powers without substantially altering the constitutional structure. As we shall see in Chapter Six, about the only politician of any national prominence who has contemplated revisiting the institutional design to handle these powers was Wilson, at least in his early academic work. There, he bemoaned the irresponsibility of the government, pointing the finger at Madison’s separation of powers and calling for formal integration between the executive and legislative branches. But when a political career beckoned, Wilson decided that vigorous presidential leadership could substitute. As we shall see in Chapter Six, however, the hope of strong presidential leadership was a false one; outside foreign relations, the chief executive’s real power is too unreliable to give our governing institutions a more nationalistic bent.

      How have these expansive new powers unbalanced the Madisonian system? There are four principal ways. First, and most important, Congress cannot handle the powers it has been given. The Framers never would have handed the Congress of the Articles of Confederation the powers in the Constitution, and we should never have given the Congress of the Constitution such expansive authority. As we move through our story, we shall find that congressional incompetence is usually the main driver of corruption. The reason is that Congress, as designed, is simply too parochial. It is actually a fallacy of composition to suggest that Congress is a national branch at all; it is, rather, the meeting place of the representatives from discrete regions all across the country. This was not a problem for the powers handed to the Congress by the original grant, but it became a problem as power after power was added. We shall discover there is a wide variety of ways Congress behaves irresponsibly, but it usually gets back to a single concept: members use the vast national powers they have since acquired to please the parochial factions that are so critical to their electoral efforts. This is the unifying link between problems as seemingly varied as the nineteenth century spoils system and the failure to regulate properly the financial services industry in the twenty-first century.

      Second, they denude the force of the republican principle. Madison depended upon majority rule to thwart minorities that had seized control of the government, though as we saw, he had his doubts because it would be difficult for voters to identify who exactly is to blame. Growing the power of this government has exacerbated that problem to extreme proportions. From the very beginning, the complicated nature of our system made it difficult to assign blame for bad policies. The addition of power after power to the government has resulted in an enormous amount of additional complexity, and no citizen can practically keep an eye on the government to ensure that it behaves. Presidents, senators, representatives, and bureaucrats too often retain plausible deniability for their role in corrupt outcomes, undermining the power of the people to advance the public good through elections.

      The third way becomes apparent when we consider the two greatest institutional alterations of the original design: the democratization of the Electoral College and the rise of political parties. These concepts are not originally in the Constitution, nor were they formally amended into it, but they are nevertheless part of the landscape now. Opening up the presidency to public voting, more than anything else, facilitated the national political parties, forging cross-state political alliances to reap the benefits the top office provides. The problem with this is that parties are formal, enduring factions, but the presidency itself was supposed to be insulated from factionalism. Democratizing the presidency, and thrusting the office into the partisan battle, inevitably changed the calculus of the occupant. He must build and maintain a coalition that almost invariably amounts to a subset of the nation at large, which means it is often in his interests to affix his gaze on something quite less than the public good. This in turn means that the president is much less able to control the localism of the Congress by the veto, especially when he is bound to its members via a political party. Thus, what should have been in theory an office that tamps down on corruption is, in practice, just as often an office that facilitates it. The more power that is granted to the executive branch, the greater capacity the president has to use that power for corrupt purposes.

      Fourth, we have built new institutions within government whose role in the system is difficult to reconcile with the Constitution. For instance, the First Bank of the United States was a private corporation that nevertheless derived a great deal of support from the feds. Ditto more recent institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. How are such institutions to be understood vis-à-vis checks and balances, especially considering the Constitutional Convention’s opposition to such publicly chartered corporations? The public-private nature of these institutions can be a breeding ground for corruption, as was particularly evident during the early years of the Second Bank of the United States, and with the accounting scandals that plagued Fannie and Freddie in the early 2000s.

      The modern bureaucracy may be classified similarly. Of course, there was an executive bureaucracy from the very beginning of the country, but its size and scope have increased so enormously that it becomes difficult—if not impossible—for Congress to supervise it properly. Indeed, one of the most important insights of political science literature in recent decades is that Congress is more likely to monitor the bureaucracy when the transaction costs of such an inquiry are paid for by interest groups, via information or campaign contributions. This, in turn, often induces bureaucrats to yield to the interests of the most connected pressure groups.

      In sum, we have a Congress that is too parochial to wield the nationalistic powers that it has been granted. We have a public that is necessarily too ill-informed to protect the republican principle. We have a politicized presidency that often lacks the capacity to check Congress for the national interest. We have these strange extraconstitutional organizations that do not fit cleanly into the schema. What does that mean? Again, consider Wilson’s metaphor for the Constitution, a Newtonian system. Various selfish interests enter the arena, are checked by and balanced with other such forces, and the final product that emerges on the other end is supposed to be in the public interest. But these new governmental powers altered the original structure in these four ways, and thus have broken the Newtonian system. Nowadays, too much of what Washington produces is not in the public interest.

      To be clear, this argument does not lead inevitably to advocacy for a night-watchman state, nor will this book call (explicitly or implicitly) for a return to the Constitution as it was understood upon ratification. Based on the premises established here, one could just as easily argue the converse position. In such a conception, the problem was that the Federalists ceded too much ground to the Anti-Federalists, and thus accepted a structure not built to operate necessary powers. The argument here cannot be situated on today’s left-right divide; it is, rather, that the powers the government now wields are poorly suited to the structures it employs to wield them, with corruption being the attending result.

      The rest of this book is dedicated to demonstrating the theory developed above. To do that, it is part history and part contemporary policy analysis.

      Chapter One looks at the battle between Madison and Hamilton over the First Bank of the United States, which established a tension that has existed ever since: leaders like Hamilton have sought to expand the powers of the government beyond the original scope of the charter to solve pressing problems. Yet those expansions come with a major downside in that they undermine the balance Madison thought the Constitution created.

      Chapter Two examines the behavior of the Jeffersonian Republican Party once it acquired control of the government in 1800. It shows that expansions of federal power are more or less permanent, СКАЧАТЬ