UNDERLYING THE CRAZINESS

Currently, the issue de jour of the Republican race for president is whether Republicans want a nominee who is willing to negotiate and compromise with the Democrats or one who is true to conservative principles and refuses to compromise.  Senator Ted Cruz said that if you want a candidate who is willing to compromise with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, then Trump is your nominee.  Donald Trump claims he is willing to negotiate with those Democratic leaders, but that he will get good deals for conservatives.  He says conservatives can believe him because he has made his fortune making good deals and even has written the second best book ever – second to the Bible (I wonder if he really believes that) – The Art of the Deal.  This concern reflects a basic constitutional principle, one that I described earlier in this blog.

It is a principle that relates to the whole question of how much power the central government should have.  Another way to voice this concern is to ask:  how little power will local governments – the governments closer to the people – have?  Republicanism is what the founding fathers wanted to maintain in the new constitution of 1787.  That is, the founders wanted the power to ultimately reside with the people, but that the actual decisions concerning governmental policy be made by representatives of the people.  Initially, this designation was made to distinguish republican governments from monarchies.  A philosopher who wrote about republican form of government was Charles de Montesquieu, who believed that for republics to work there needed to be a high degree of agreement among the citizens who lived under such a government.  This agreement reflects a communal familiarity among the citizens, a deep level of sympathy and commonality.  Without such agreement, policy disputes would not only arise, but also be bitter and rancorous.  The polity would lose the necessary levels of cohesion, resulting in the system splintering.  To assure this did not happen, republics needed to be relatively small states since “bigness” would mean more and more diverse interests or factions.  Such diversity would eat away at any sense of “we’re in this together.”   As such, policy would be next to impossible to formulate and therefore, needs would go unmet.  If the United States (with a capital “U”) were to succeed, the founders would have to find a way to solve this inherent problem of preserving a republican form of government in a large polity setting – as the one they were forming with the new constitution.

Of course, our structural federal arrangement was the answer, where local governmental entities would govern local concerns and the central government would be limited to handling the national concerns.  The problem, because of historical forces beyond anyone’s ability to halt or even modify very much, is that more and more concerns in the subsequent years became national.  And even the Constitution of 1787 (and how it has been amended since) contains basic principles that have nationalized many issues that one might consider local in nature. 

Take the regulation of marriage.  Marriage is an institution that serves to anchor one of our basic institutions, the family.  It is the marriage ceremony that contains the agreement on which a family is based.  By its nature, this sounds and is a local issue.  I would say, for the most part, marriage is still legally treated as a local issue.  But our national constitution states that there will be equal protection under the law and that includes state law (Fourteenth Amendment).  So, unless the state has a legitimate interest, it cannot discriminate in its laws.  For example, given that homosexuality is a natural occurrence and there is no deleterious aspect to state interests in anyone being homosexual, there is no legitimate state interest affected by gays or lesbians getting married in same sex arrangements.  This is what the Supreme Court just settled.  But this has angered many people who feel, for religious reasons, that same sex marriages are an affront to God.  Hence, a national policy is viewed by these people as overstepping the prerogatives of local governance.  Under such a situation, to many, the republican principle is breached and undermines the whole constitutional arrangement.

With this and other local-national disputes, Ted Cruz’s pledge to not engage, as president, in “deal making” and, thereby, compromise on principle, attracts many voters such as those who have been angered by the gay marriage decision of the Supreme Court.  The problem is that our system of government, as determined by our republican solution, depends on deal making, on compromising.  We have a federal system and that depends on more than just having state and national governments; it also demands that our representatives meet and hash out policy decisions by giving and taking in not a parliament, but in a congress.  It is a congress in which our representatives congregate and through majority vote determine what should be done.  They even have rules in Congress – that I don’t fully agree with – in which it takes more than a majority to agree on new laws (in effect now, it takes sixty, as opposed to fifty-one senators to agree before legislation passes that house of Congress).  Therefore, for a Cruz approach to work – where legislation would get done – you would need a parliamentary system in which the majority party or a majority coalition could secure passage of what it wants.  In our system, you not only have to get pending bills through two houses of Congress, but then have to get the president to agree and, at least, not veto it.  If the president vetoes pending legislation, proponents of the bill need to muster up super majorities (two-thirds vote) in each house to make it law.  Just so you know, a Cruz approach would guarantee that nothing will get done for another four years.  If this happens, given what we are now experiencing, this will increase levels of frustration and anger among the citizenry and promise that our future politics will be even more bizarre than they are now and perhaps more dangerous.