Election Series, No. 10

This article continues our online series of election-year commentaries. We welcome your response.

No. 10—November 17, 2008

The Question of National Governance

A Response to Readers’ Comments on the November 7 Capital Commentary, “The Obama Victory”

by James W. Skillen

In my Capital Commentary of November 7, I argued that the United States is now a national political community and no longer primarily a federally protected collection of state political communities. For that reason, I argued, a better system is needed to strengthen national governance.

Readers sent many questions and criticisms. Some thought I was proposing to scrap the US Constitution, or to remove all checks and balances on the federal government, or to establish socialism. Since I was not suggesting anything of the kind, and since some of the questions deserve more detailed comment, it seems best to respond to all the questions and criticisms at once.

My argument is not to scrap the Constitution or to eliminate state and local governments. A federal system can be a good system of government. The question today, however, is how the national or federal government ought to govern, in contrast to the way it was designed to govern at the end of the eighteenth century. We now have a nationally integrated public, and the federal government has been struggling more and more each decade to respond to the needs and crises of a national polity. Yet, as a nationwide citizenry, we have no means of holding Congress accountable to govern for the good of the nation as a whole. Our national electorate chooses only the president. Each member of the House and the Senate is chosen by voters in individual congressional districts or states, each of which represents only a small part of the national electorate. Rather than our system providing adequate checks and balances on the central government, the latter is now more subject to the control of unelected interest groups than it is to the control of the American electorate. (See my first Election Series commentary, on the limits of the presidency.)

The existing checks and balances for the federal government—such as separation of the branches of government, the Bill of Rights, regular elections, the constitutional amendment process, and access to the courts for redress of grievances—should certainly remain. I am not proposing a comprehensive rewriting of the Constitution. But our national government (with the exception of the president) is constrained by the electoral system to function as a broker of competing state and local interests and of unelected national interest groups. The federal government was not designed to be a nationally accountable legislative body. (I have written in detail on this subject in chapter 10 of In Pursuit of Justice: Christian-democratic Explorations. Three of the Center’s Guidelines on Government and Citizenship—those discussing the political community, the task of government, and the responsibility of citizenship—touch on these matters.) I am not calling for more government or for bigger government but for responsible, accountable government at the national level.

Near the beginning of my commentary, I wrote that “Obama’s election confirms the maturation of a national political community that demands national governance.” I did not intend to suggest that Barack Obama created or brought into existence the national community. What I was implying is that Obama’s election confirms, more clearly than ever before, the existence of a national political community that can no longer be properly governed by the existing interest-group brokering processes. Subsequent paragraphs in that commentary about the approaches of the Roosevelt, Johnson, Reagan, and Bush administrations were intended to show that the emergence of a nationwide political community has been building gradually for at least 75 years and is now fully upon us.

Evidence of a problem

Consider our present circumstances. The most immediate and obvious challenge facing the nation is the domestic and international financial crisis. A second nationwide challenge is the need for some kind of national health-care policy. A third concerns the interdependent issues of energy, transportation, and the environment. A fourth is our nationwide infrastructure degradation. A fifth is the impending Social Security crisis. A sixth is the fact that almost every year now, Congress is unable, in time for the beginning of the federal fiscal year on October 1, to pass the approximately 17 appropriations bills needed to fund the federal government. And there are many more examples that can be cited. All of these are issues that require sound legislative decisions by both houses of Congress and the president on behalf of the nation as a whole. Yet legislative battles over these issues increasingly lead nowhere because the congressional brokering process works primarily to try to satisfy competing state and regional interests and competing national interest groups.

Now at the end of the Bush administration, the financial crisis has become so severe that the president, his treasury secretary, and the chairman of the Federal Reserve—all of whom support free markets and oppose big government—have instituted a series of the most substantial federal take-over (or federal-interference) schemes ever enacted in American history. Yet the very steps the administration has taken have been presented with explicit statements that the actions contradict the administration’s philosophy and are not in keeping with its preferences. Why then has the administration taken these steps? Because it judges them to be necessary to save the national banking system and the entire economy. The obligation of nationwide governance, in other words, has been forced upon them even though they wish the markets could have taken care of themselves. Consequently, the outcome we are witnessing is the administration’s hit-and-miss approach of piecemeal pragmatism, which changes day by day in an almost arbitrary fashion.

The steps now being taken to deal with the financial and economic crisis are emergency reactions to circumstances that cannot be fathomed by current governing philosophies or dealt with coherently and deliberately by the current system of governance. This alone is evidence of the fact that something is wrong with our system of national governance because the crisis was not imposed on us from the outside, like a foreign military invasion or a natural catastrophe. This nationwide and international financial crisis was created by, and from within, our own system of markets and governance.

Society’s diverse institutions

When I suggested that Obama appears to have the instincts and the desire to seek out a new mode of national governance, which would move us beyond the approaches taken by Roosevelt, Johnson, Reagan, and Bush, I also estimated that he is unlikely to be able to pull it off by means of strong administrative decision-making alone. The hindrances are systemic and not merely personal. Nor was I implying that because Obama wants to pursue a new mode of national governance, he thereby has my full support for everything he will try to do. As the Center’s Guidelines make clear, and as I summarized in my Election Series piece of October 29, “Guidelines for Voting,” I am opposed, for example, to Obama’s stances on abortion, on hiring-rights restrictions on faith-based organizations, and on an education policy that rejects equal government support of students who attend nongovernment schools. And undoubtedly, I will be critical of the new president’s actions on a variety of economic, social, and foreign policy issues. My commentary was not a general endorsement of Obama’s complete agenda but a call for a new approach to governance at the national level.

In this regard, the Center’s long-held conviction is that the most important limits on the federal government are not those of states’ rights and individual rights but rather the responsibilities that belong to nongovernment organizations and institutions such as families, churches, businesses, universities, and many others. President-elect Obama may have a view of society that is too undifferentiated, and he may believe that the federal government can do more to take care of citizens than can be achieved justly if government does not begin with the proper recognition and protection of nongovernment institutions and organizations. This is a matter of political philosophy and policy design, and those of us at the Center stand ready either to challenge or to encourage his approach on any of these fronts, depending on the direction he takes.

But the question of society’s diverse institutional structure, which must be recognized and upheld by government, is different from the question of different levels of government. Protecting society’s diversified institutional responsibilities is an obligation at every level of government and is not assured simply by turning to local and state governments and resisting the federal government. If, as I am arguing, the federal government ought to be governing wisely and justly for the national common good, then a system that inhibits the exercise of that responsibility is detrimental to all citizens and to all institutions and organizations of society.

Toward more just governance

At this point we need to recognize that issues such as abortion, education choice, “same-sex” marriage, and equitable treatment of all social-service agencies are precisely the kinds of issues that illuminate the problem of inadequate national governance. Within the framework of the Constitution, all of these issues belong to the governing authority of the separate states. Marriage law, education, and welfare policies, for example, are not original jurisdictional responsibilities of the federal government. Yet, they have all become national issues, and disputes over them frequently go to the US Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, however, is not a legislative body and should not be trying to resolve the kinds of national policy questions that need to be handled by deliberative, accountable legislative processes. In other words, not all of the substantive issues of education and social policy can be settled by adjudicating the civil-rights claims of individuals who appeal to the Constitution and thus to the Supreme Court. And national issues of this kind cannot be handled simply by saying, Let the states decide. This is why the relation between the jurisdiction of state governments and the jurisdiction of the national government requires revision and a stronger, more direct accountability of Congress and the president to the national citizenry.

Finally, the commentary of November 7 was not offered as a broad assessment of the Obama election victory. Whether that victory represents a significant, long-term realignment of voters in favor of a new kind of Democratic Party remains to be seen. And whether any such realignment brings the country closer to the Center’s philosophy and policy stances also remains to be seen. Moreover, since the symbolism of Obama’s victory arises both from the fact that an African-American figure has been chosen for the highest office in the land and from the possibility that his election may represent some kind of post-racial achievement, it will take a long time to evaluate the significance of his election. Obama is certainly a very different kind of election winner and president-elect. He is young and was not shaped personally by the battles of the 1960s. He ran a remarkable campaign and won support across the full range of American voters. Yet the question of whether his victory was due more to popular distaste for the Bush administration and the burgeoning financial crisis than to his own genius and appeal to voters cannot be fathomed this early.

One thing is certain: campaigning to win an election is not the same as governing. Those are two different arts. Therefore, since candidates reveal few details about how they will govern, and since the president’s relation to Congress and its interest-group attendants will have a great deal to do with how successful a new president can become, we will simply have to wait to see what an Obama administration actually achieves.

And this brings the whole matter back to us—to citizens and voters. If at the points where we agree with Obama’s policies we simply sit back and cheer, and if at the points where we disagree with his administration we simply support interest groups who oppose him, we will fit right into the mode of citizenship that is part of our national governance problem. Passivity and interest-group politics are what hinder the realization of the kind of national governance the country now needs, because they lead to the kind of congressionally brokered agreements that usually fall short of enhancing the longer-term national common good. Insofar as the United States needs a significantly reformed approach to national governance and needs to be reshaped by the kind of philosophy and policy agenda the Center for Public Justice is proposing, then a new kind of nationwide citizens organization needs to be built to help bring about such change.

The extent to which the new Obama administration contributes to the kind of political change the Center is working for remains to be seen. Yet whatever the degree of constructive change that takes place during his presidency, those of us associated with the Center should be working to promote reform toward more just governance at home and abroad.

Dr. Skillen is President of the Center for Public Justice.