Gerald Ford, in his first speech in office, said that we were over our “national nightmare”. What followed from it were a series of measures to bring some control over the federal bureaucracy so that a future President could not manipulate it in the ways Nixon had. These included the Inspectors General offices in the various cabinet departments, those same offices which President Trump has vacated so that he can replace the career officials with his own supporters. What will happen when the present national nightmare is ended and Joe Biden becomes President, which assumes that state election officials will conduct honest elections and that the Russians will not very significantly influence the campaign or its results? The larger question is a very hard one to answer.
It is to be remembered that the controls on someone who was manifestly unqualified to be President, someone with no governmental experience, of weak character and low intelligence, was supposed to be the people of the establishment that he hired for his cabinet and as his chief of staff. He got rid of two military figures, James Mattis, who was his Secretary of Defense, and John Kelly, who was his Chief of Staff, and now has sycophants surrounding him. Kirstjen Nielsen, his Secretary of Homeland Security, was fired after she told Trump that she could not carry out illegal orders, however cooperative she had previously been with his very punitive policy on border crossing. So the main thing that has kept Trump in check is his own inability to stay focussed or to master the reins of government, and so all he does is fulminate against everyone as an enemy or an incompetent, never having to consider how come he surrounds himself with so many incompetent or evil people. What if another rogue President were elected who was much more clever than Trump? How could he or she be controlled so as not to overstep the bounds of what a President is supposed to do, which is to allow the experts in the departments to make all but the final decision and to rely on the advice of only a chosen few on whether to implement that advice?
There is another form of protection against an out of control President which worked pretty well until the Cold War created “the Imperial Presidency”, a term coined by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. to refer to the overarching power of a President who could launch nuclear weapons perhaps without even consulting congressional leaders seeped into a sense of the Executive Branch as being the dominant branch of government. We should think back to the history of the Republic before that time. From John Adams on, up to FDR, and with very few exceptions, such as Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, the President had not ruled the roost. Rather, we lived in a time of congressional supremacy or what Woodrow Wilson called in his book on the subject “Congressional Government”. That meant that most issues and initiatives were done in Congress. It was the War Hawks in Congress who brought on the War of 1812. The debates on slavery and the compromises that were forged to deal with it were conducted in and arrived at in the United States Senate, which was indeed “the greatest deliberative body in the world”. We may now be critical of the fact that all those debates and compromises did not prevent a Civil War, but the period of some forty years can be seen as democracy in action-- at least for white Americans. After Lincoln and despite the resistance of Grant, Congress went back to command government action, whether that was by giving the ex-Confederate states the power to restore something of a semblance of the old slave system, or by allowing northern finance to drive industrialism forward. Even Woodrow Wilson, who wanted to be a strong President and in many respects was, could not get his crowning achievement, the Versailles Treaty, through the Senate, and FDR had to play ball with Southern senators to get his domestic legislation approved.
So here are two scenarios, each of them plausible because there are so many variables in play that it is difficult to say which will be the decisive one. Biden might get elected and have a majority in both houses of Congress, which means something could be done, because voters say they like divided government, where one party has control of the Presidency and the other party has control over at least one house of Congress, because that is what they have gotten used to, the voters at the same time wanting government to get something done, which would happen only if there were one party government. The government would then turn into a gang of three, ours being, even after the election, a still very polarized two party system, one in which the Speaker of the House, the Senate Majority Leader and the President dicker among themselves on the legislative agenda while Senate members are the leading spokespeople in the debates about what should be included in legislation, as is what happened a little bit in the negotiations over Obamacare, although no one was very eloquent at the time. Obama wisely left it to the chambers to decide what should be included in the bill, which was contrary to the strategy that had been pursued by Hillary Clinton, who had wanted her health care reform bill to be designed in the White House and then rammed through Congress. Did not happen.
Another possibility is that some foreign policy crisis pops up. You never can tell what will emerge, and we have gone a long time without one in that the War on Terror lasted from before 2001 until Obama pulled most of our troops out of Afghanistan after having removed them from Iraq, letting the Middle East stew in its own juices. Maybe China gets belligerent, which is unlikely because they are smart enough to understand that political and economic dominance in their region and around the world is more important than military adventures. Or maybe the Middle East acts up, which is also unlikely because the Sunnis have formed a united front with Israel and the United States to keep the Shiites in check, and that seems to be working, as is evidenced by the fact that rumor has it that a United States and Israeli initiative was the cause of the recent blasts in Iran that set back its uranium enrichment program. The main threat in the world may be another pandemic, Russia barely able to keep its head above water because world oil prices are down and likely to stay that way. So people who have time to dream about the Apocalypse will only have global warming to talk about and noone wants to do anything about that, except Joe Biden who wants to use it as an excuse for creating jobs to jumpstart the American economy and so help it recover from the coronavirus pandemic. His proposal is reminiscent of John Kenneth Galbraith’s proposal of the Fifties to build an ice mountain in Texas just to create jobs. Were there to be a foreign policy crisis, however, then the President might grow strong again, wearing his mantle as Commander in Chief much more glaringly than has been the case for more than a decade now.
There is a more likely development that will bring about the control of a rogue President. It does not require new legislation so much as a widespread and ever growing recognition that the various government departments are professionalized, which means that they are not only autonomous but make judgements on the basis of the best information and analysis available in their fields of endeavor and this expertise is recognized by whomever heads the government. That makes the Cabinet more like it is in Great Britain, where permanent civil servants all but run the ministries. The American Constitution is also more like the British one than is usually understood in that it is also an accumulation of accepted practices and beliefs and not just of what one provision or another of the written constitution requires. The Vice-Presidency did not become a position of significance until Jimmy Carter gave his Vice President, Walter Mondale, a measure of responsibility and met with him weekly to secure his advice and that job has gained ever greater significance, so that it is said that Barack Obama delegated a quarter of the Presidential portfolio to Joe Biden.
We have moved a long way in that direction of autonomous departments. In the case of the Department of Justice. Robert Kennedy was clearly a political appointee who would not cross his brother but everybody’s memoirs suggest that the two did not confer about most of what went on in the Department of Justice. The two didn’t discuss, for example, the Bureau of indian Affairs. Robert was his brother’s closest and most trusted advisor on any number of other issues, such as during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell, was clearly his political operative but maybe it was the other way round. Since then, however, Attorneys General have tried to keep their departments separate from political influence and were successful enough so that William Barr, Trump’s current Attorney General, is seen as untrue to his office because he is so much a spokesman and implementer of what is good for the President. The Department of Defense is also fairly independent in that it follows the institutional prerogatives of the military even when, as now, the leader is a man who was previously an aerospace industry lobbyist who now sounds like a spokesman for the gravitas laden military point of view and the right of the armed forces to each chart their own way, even if occasionally giving in to White House pressure, as that includes not putting Col. Alexander Vindman on the promotion list for General. But being a General is and always has been a political appointment. It is good that promotion to that rank requires Senate approval. You don’t want it taken out of the hands of politicians, the Romans notorious for not being able to control their generals once they had been appointed.
One cabinet post that rigorously resists a professionalism that might put it at odds with the President is the Department of Education, perhaps because what plays well in education changes so regularly, a matter of what is fashionable rather than what is well established by research or theory. Lamar Alexander, the by no means unthoughtful Secretary of Education in the George H. W. Bush Administration, recognized the difficulty of overcoming urban infrastructure through education and relied heavily on Diane Ravitch, a leading educational theorist of her time, to guide him. He supported teacher groups opposed to reformist attempts at giving more power to experts and to parents. Obama’s Secretary of Education was Arne Duncan. He supported the reform movement of his time, which was a top down drive to improve standards and hold teachers accountable for student performance. Trump’s Secretary of Education is Betsy De Vos, who knows nothing about the history of educational research and reform, only about supporting private and for profit schools from kindergarten through college, a policy that makes sense to the entrepreneurial driven President Trump. Even the Department of Health and Human Services is more driven by solid research because it is in the business of distributing vast amounts of money through highly regulated programs, and so it is useful to know the details of block grants and Medicare reimbursement when assuming that job, or at least to have people in place who know enough so that they can advise you. However, in the last few days, Trump has announced that he wants HHS rather than CDC to collect coronavirus statistics. That suggests that he thinks he will be able to influence what gets reported.
An important part of the Trump intrusion on the institutions of government is his warfare with the Center for Disease Control. Its Director, Robert Redfield, has deferred to the President or disregarded what he says rather than challenge him, which some might think discredits his own dedication to professionalism. That is the fate that occurs to many Trump associates, they compromised simply by not saying overtly that Trump is in the wrong. Sometimes you can’t finesse that question. Trump gets away with disregarding the CDC or questioning the character or judgment of those who work there. It would make sense, however, for a President to oppose his experts if he did so on the basis of principle rather than pique or self interest. So the President even demeans the power of the President to act independently of his agencies if he or she has sufficient reason to do so, as would be the case if the President presented a reasoned assessment for why it was necessary to reopen the economy despite the objections of medical people who are solely concerned with the health perspective on the complex, multilayered crisis now to be faced..
So, in general, the professionalism of departments leads to their autonomy from the President and so the system can keep going either with a lazy or uninformed President who serves more and more as a figurehead for the nation rather than as a chief executive who imprints on his administration his or her own point of view about things. Maybe that will fulfill the hope of the Founding Fathers that the American government would be a perpetual motion machine in that the balance of powers would keep it going however poor were some of the people who held power within the government. Whether the desire to separate government from politics is even admirable much less a practical idea rests in abeyance until some practical issue comes along as a natural experiment to prove the proposition true or false. For the moment, it seems that a non-professional government has not served us well during the time of the coronavirus.