Representation - Addendum

I was all in a tizzy about getting that post in before 11, and I forgot a couple things that should probably be mentioned.

Topics where I'm most comfortable with the president being a trustee: foreign affairs, technical/scientific issues, civil rights issues, economic/ job growth issues.

Topics where it's probably better for the president to be a delegate: ...basically everything else? Stuff like gun rights and education policy, for example. Also, if the president would like to be reelected, it's probably important for him to act (at least somewhat of) a delegate on the issues people care most about. According to a Pew Poll* done in January, the policies most rated as a "top priority for 2011" were the economy, jobs, terrorism, education, and social security. Hmm. Tricky. Knowing what issues people think are important isn't enough; you also have to know what it is people want done about the situation. Take 'jobs', for example. Yeah, we all want there to be more jobs and lower unemployment. But is there a broad consensus on how to make that happen? And if there's not, does simply acknowledging the issue and coming up with some sort of plan qualify you as a delegate? If the people are saying "we need more jobs" (but they don't have any concrete message about how) and Barack Obama's all "here's my plan for more jobs!" does that make him a delegate? Or is he only a delegate if people are like "here is our plan for reducing unemployment" and he says "ok, i'll put this plan into action right now!" The delegate / trustee schism doesn't seem to work very well with this example.

I feel like this added paragraph was more confusing than enlightening, but I wrote it, so I might as well put it up...I feel like I had an important thought somewhere in there. Or I just wanted to show that I had more facts and figures. (cause i know you guys are totally impressed by the fact that I've now linked you to two sets of stats instead of just one.)

*http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1865/poll-public-top-policy-priorities-2011-health-care-reform-repeal-expand

Representation

So, who does a President represent? The short answer is, well…everybody. “The people.” Americans. His country as a whole. Not just the voters, not just his party, not just the big corporate donors that contributed to his campaign. The President is there to do what’s best for the entire nation. Sure, if he’s a democrat, his policies will still generally reflect democratic principles. That’s the lens he sees the world from and the ideology he subscribes to. But that’s not the same thing as the ‘party first’ mentality, not by a long shot.

What type of representative should he be? It seems like the only answer that has any real-world applicability is politico. The other two options are just these abstract, oversimplified concepts that don’t have a lot of merit when you’re trying to describe the way the political process actually works. What politician’s record could ever be put 100% into either the delegate or trustee category? The terms make sense if you want to use them to describe the way a politician reacted to a single, specific incident, but are pretty much useless otherwise.

How exactly does a President represent the American people, and what does representation even mean in this sense? Well, first and foremost it entails abiding by the Constitution and by the laws Congress has passed regarding the Executive Branch. (Sorry if that seems stupidly obvious, but bear with me.) Representing America means respecting the principle of majority rule while protecting minority rights. It does NOT mean that whenever 51% of Americans who happen to have been polled get some damnfool idea in their head that the President should immediately reverse course. Yes, if the majority of people seem to be strongly in favor of something (AND there doesn’t seem to be any likelihood of chaos erupting as a result of it, AND it doesn’t encroach on anyone’s rights) the president should probably accede to their will/demands. But honestly, isn’t that kind of what we have Congress for? To be all in touch with the people or whatever? Yes, we elect a President based on a broad policy agenda, but we also elect him to be a leader, and to make decisions. Part of electing a President is about choosing someone whose judgment we trust. I may not agree with everything the President does, but I have to respect his right to be, as much as it pains me to use  the term, “the decider.” Within the limits that Congress has set for him, anyway. If we wanted things to swing with whatever a majority of people believed at the time, we could just have a referendum on everything.

Now obviously this isn’t a good idea in the least. (It’s an impossible one, actually. What a mess. But it brings me to my next point: Ugh. It’s so hard to tell what the ‘American People’ actually want. They’re not some unified body.  There’s no group consciousness or way to make every person happy. There’s this clamoring mess of opinions, and upset, angry people always seem to have much bigger microphones than people who are actually happy with whatever the president proposes. Not to mention the questionable trustworthiness of polling data…

Another question raised was whether people’s level of knowledge on issues matters. Yes! It matters so much! It totally matters! Who are these ridiculous people that say it doesn’t matter? We don’t expect the public to negotiate nuclear treaties, and to be quite blunt, we shouldn’t necessarily care what they think. Americans are busy. They’ve got jobs and shit to do. They don’t have time to be experts on every political issue. Again, that’s why they have Congressmen. (Not that Congressmen are actually experts in most of these things either. That’s why they have staff…) Just ‘cause they came up with some half-cocked notion anyway based on a couple minutes of some incendiary rhetoric from some useless talking head doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Take global warming, for example. According to this Yale University/Gallup poll I found*, less than half of Americans believe there is scientific consensus on global warming, and about 70% are opposed to increasing gas or energy taxes to help combat it. Should the president really wait for everyone else to get on board if he views global warming as a looming threat to our future security?  No! It’s a highly technical, scientific issue that a majority of Americans* admit to not generally being that worried about. Sounds like a textbook case for acting as a trustee rather than a delegate…

Ok, I think the last thing I really have to mention is substantive/descriptive/symbolic representations. Maybe I’m viewing this too simplistically, but this part seems really easy. As far as the president is concerned at least, substantive and descriptive representation should be the same thing. I argued before that the president is a representative for all Americans, so he’s working to enhance the substantive representation of everyone equally. Not one specific social/demographic group over another. They’re all equally his constituents. Am I viewing this wrong? It seems like it makes sense. Barack Obama’s not just there to help middle aged guys or half-black people or people born in Hawaii or whatever; he’s representing the collective ‘social group’ that includes each and every US citizen. Symbolic representation, on the other hand, I have a major problem with. It’s totally insidious. That would be like women congressmen saying that women shouldn’t be able to vote. How do you turn traitor on your own interests like that? And it gives things this veneer of authority, like “oh, she’s a woman, so she knows why women shouldn’t be able to vote.” That’s an exaggerated example, but the point holds. (I had others, but they seemed more…contentious. Does this point make sense though?) Symbolic representation just seems to be using your social/demographic group in a most unseemly manner for your own personal ends. I can’t think of an example where I like it. At all.

So, reading back through this, I’m suddenly realizing that I view the Executive Branch in a much more paternalistic, overarching manner than I would have originally assumed.  Apparently I’m a Rooseveltian at heart after all…

* http://environment.yale.edu/news/5310

Theories of the Presidency

I’m trying to imagine the idea of Taft and Roosevelt being good friends. The book says they were, but it seems like a very unequal pairing. Taft would so have been the Robin to Roosevelt’s Batman. You just don’t think of TR having friends so much as…lackeys. Sycophants.

Unsurprisingly, the vastly different personalities of these two men carried over into their theories of executive authority. Roosevelt’s conception of the president’s power was known as stewardship theory. Here’s a quote from his autobiography that sums it all up:

I declined to adopt the view that what was imperatively necessary for the nation could not be done by the President unless he could find some specific authorization for it.  My belief was that it was not only his right but his duty to do anything that the needs of the nation demanded unless such action was forbidden by the Constitution or by the laws. . . .  I did not usurp power, but I did greatly broaden the use of executive power. . . .  I acted. . . whenever and in whatever manner was necessary, unless prevented by direct constitutional or legislative prohibition. . . .  The course I followed [was] of regarding the Executive as subject only to the people, and, under the Constitution, bound to serve the people affirmatively in cases where the Constitution does not explicitly forbid him to render the service.

Theodore Roosevelt  [The Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt (NY: Scribner’s, 1913).]

So, in short, Roosevelt thought he could do anything the constitution didn’t explicitly bar him from doing. This argument seems a little like a kid telling his mom that she didn’t say he couldn’t have ten cookies, so he assumed it would be ok. I admire the audacity of it though.

Taft’s argument, like Taft, was much wimpier. (Does his theory even have a name? Is it just the Whig theory? Well, it lost out anyway, so I guess it doesn’t matter much.) Taft believed that a President’s powers were limited to those explicitly stated in the Constitution. If it wasn’t an enumerated power, then it wasn’t any sort of power at all. This version of the Presidency is much more constrained and circumscribed; it’s a theory of the presidency that sees Congress, rather than the executive, as the dominant branch.

I’m a little torn on what I think about these two theories. Rarely is there a topic on which I haven’t developed an annoyingly strong opinion, but this one has me at a loss. I think I’m just too biased. I remember someone in our class saying that he supported Roosevelt’s theory when he liked the president and Taft’s when he didn’t, and that’s exactly how I feel about it. Such arbitrariness is not exactly a strong basis for building a theory of the presidency. The rules have to apply to everyone. But what should the rules be??

Can I just argue instead that Roosevelt’s theory has already won out? There’s really no going back to Taft’s conception of a subservient executive branch at this point. Power, once ceded, is very difficult to take back. And I do, as a general rule, lean more toward Roosevelt’s conception than Taft’s. You can’t rely on Congress as the dominant entity if you actually want to be able to get things done. A working government needs one leader to be able to turn to, one person to be responsible for making quick decisions.

I think that one thing both sides can agree on is that whether you think the President should have more power or less, his official Constitutional authority is annoyingly ill defined. Maybe that sort of flexibility was necessary when the founders first wrote it, but it’s time we put some clearer parameters on the office of the President.

Part of the problem seems to be that we need to leave Presidents room to deal with unforeseen situations, and strictly defining the limits of the Presidency might get in the way of that.  Do I think FDR should have been able to put Japanese people into internment camps? Or that Lincoln should have been able to suspend habeas corpus? Absolutely not! (Obviously!) But what specific limit on executive authority would have prevented this?  How do we limit these kinds of injustices without neutering the presidency so much that it’s no longer effective?

I feel like this has been a really unsatisfactory blog entry, so I hope that you guys had clearer ideas of what you thought than I did. Maybe I can redeem myself in the comments part of this.