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February 17, 2006

Democracy Doesn't Work

When the founders sat down in Philadelphia in 1787 to draft an alternative to the Articles of Confederation, they laid out the three branches of government with multiple checks and balances on the assumption that each part of government would jealously guard its powers, this tension keeping all parts of government in check. Regrettably, for all their wisdom, the founders were unable to predict the rise of what they called faction, and what we today call political parties.

This missing tension abets abuse and abrogates important checks and balances on how the federal government operates. Today's object lesson, the quashing of the Senate's probe into the administration's use of wiretaps to monitor phone calls within the United States. Let me note up front that I have no objection to a wiretapping program that allows our intelligence agencies to listen in on calls from known terrorists to people within the United States or vice versa, and I do not pretend to know enough about the law to know whether or not the Bush administration violated the law with the program in question. What I do know, however, is that Congress has the right and the duty to provide oversight of this program to prevent abuse, and Congress is not living up to its responsibilities. The blame for this can be laid with both parties; the Republicans seem more interested in avoiding taking a political hit than in determining the appropriateness and legality of the program, and the Democrats seem more interested in bringing down the Bush administration than in fine-tuning the program to balance civil liberties with fighting terrorism. (Please note that these are generalizations; I am confident that there are members of both parties who wish to do precisely that, but the evidence seems to suggest that the default position on both sides is more attuned to political advantage than to doing what is right.)

The U.S. Consitution is a marvelous document, and the government it lays out has done an impressive job of restraining government's natural tendency towards expansion and abuse. But the Constitution's balances were based in large part on a flawed assumption: that each branch of government would jealously guard its own prerogatives. Because of the rise of parties, when the same party controls multiple branches of government abuse becomes far more likely because members of the same party have an incentive to cover for one another to prevent political backlash. It is not a coincidence that government spending has rocketed far higher and faster under a purely Republican government than it ever could have reached under a divided government. Nor is it surprising that the Bush administration may have been able to abuse its authority while Republicans control Congress: people will take as much power as they can get, and it is all the worse when they are acting in the public's presumed better interest. I will not suggest that the Bush administration has attempted to grab as much executive power as possible because they are bad people; in some ways, that would be easier to prevent. It is when people are convinced that they need power in order to prevent something bad that the worst abuses occur, because they are easier to rationalize. Do we have innocent people at Guantanamo? Maybe, but that's a small price to pay to keep terrorists from killing us. Is an NSA program to listen in on phone calls lacking in oversight to prevent abuse? Yes, but we can't afford the risk of missing a terrorist phone call. The motives are good, but the results can be very bad. This is why the Constitution attempted to set up a system of government that would expend its energy fighting each other rather than oppressing the people. If the President, the Supreme Court, the House and the Senate were all guarding their own prerogatives from encroachment by the other branches, it would be far more difficult for any one element to abuse its power without being called on it by the other branches. The loyalties of party disrupt that balance.

What is the answer? In the short term, we can reduce the problem of government working together by voting for divided government. I will be voting Democratic this Fall, for example, on the theory that either a Democratic House or Senate will be more likely to defend Congressional prerogatives against executive encroachment. Yes, this means that we may see impeachment proceedings against President Bush, but the republic survived President Clinton's impeachment, so I suspect we can survive President Bush's as well. For the long term, however, the best solution is a constiutional convention. Our Constitution is over 200 years old, and the balance it attempted to create between branches of government to restrict government power no longer holds. After 200 years, taking some time to rebuild the government to reflect what we've learned in the intervening years seems a reasonable course of action.

For those who are curious, the post title comes from a Simpsons episode in which Homer angrily proclaims after an important referendum passes, "When will people learn? Democracy doesn't work!"