The shift of power from the executive to the legislative branch of government has come with a terrible swiftness, reeling to the mind. It is yet another historical irony because although it has been American conservatives who have railed against executive supremacy, it is American liberals who are benefiting from the ascendancy of the legislative branch.
We all know how it happened. It was not the result of an orderly rethinking of government arrangements. It didn’t come after three years’ study by a huge Hoover Commission, or even from the deliberations of Mr. Hutchins’ zoo out in Santa Barbara. It happened because of Watergate and the peculiar leverages one event had upon another.
It began with the fear of the omnipotent President in foreign affairs. The revolt in Congress was in reaction to the uses made by Lyndon Johnson of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed in
1965. Before that, Republicans in particular had criticized executive arrogance in foreign affairs. Indeed, if the standards brought up for Mr. Nixon’s conduct of foreign affairs had been used against Franklin Delano Roosevelt, I do believe the gentleman would have been not only impeached, but hanged.
Then with the general disgust that followed Mr. Nixon’s resignation, the voters stayed home in droves, and those who went to the polls voted substantially for a young set of legislators who went to Washington quite determined not only to dominate foreign policy, but to run the domestic plant as well. It happened that this set of legislators were of a progressive inclination: opposed to any of the ideas loosely associated with the memory of Mr. Nixon. Accordingly, they went to Washington and began doing what everybody likes most to do: spend other people’s money.
Early on, in a show of power against the Democratic leadership which has always believed in deficit financing but stops this side of the Weimar Republic level, they established rule by caucus. This is now called King Caucus, and it tends to work as follows. The majority party caucuses, and reaches a conclusion concerning a particular issue. The minority within the party are considered bound by the wishes of the majority, even as in a parliamentary democracy in Europe. So that when they appear on the floor of, say, the House of Representatives, the Democrats vote like the Rockettes, and huge majorities sanction the populist policies voted by the majority of the caucus.
It is always a little risky to play this game, but it is fair to play it just the same. Applied to the present situation, it is possible to say that Congress is being run by a set of legislators who received the vote of about 20 per cent of the American people. That’s how many, in the election of 1974, rolled up the Democratic landslide.
Now, conservative complaints against executive arrogance were not overstated. The best single treatment of the subject is in James Burnham’s book Congress and the American Tradition, published nearly twenty years ago.
It is Congress itself that should curb the excesses of King Caucus.
But legislative supremacy suggests legislative responsibility. Otherwise, what you have is legislative tyranny. In the situation as it is developing, congressmen appear to be voting without any regard for any fixed principle whatever. This is not, to be sure, a good season for collegiate principles. The idea that everybody’s individual conscience ought to be the only guide is enshrined in the intellectual successes of
Daniel Ellsberg and the Berrigan Brothers. Congress proceeds on twin assumptions. The first is that every congressman is entitled not only to know all the nation’s secrets but, in fact, to use his own judgment on whether to share them with the Associated Press. The other assumption is that it is an act of bourgeois restraint to spend less money than is required to achieve whatever philanthropic purpose any legislator has in mind.
The natural answer to an irresponsible Congress is – a responsible Congress. It is Congress itself that should curb the excesses of King Caucus. Otherwise, it requires the re-establishment of a dominant Executive. There are conservative theorists who reason that only a strong Executive can summon the public power to contest an irresponsible Congress backed by the huge bureaucracy it feeds. We need at this moment, above all, expressions from responsible Democrats in the House and in the Senate deploring the jacobinical excesses of some of their colleagues. These Democrats need, in turn, support from sober members of the progressive establishment. Because mature men know that, in the end, nothing is achieved by congressional irresponsibility except the loss of freedom and stability.
— William F. Buckley Jr. was the founder and editor of National Review.