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| Dems Want Wal-Mart to Tithe on Healthcare | Is Senator Schumer With Us or Against Us? |
by Christopher Chantrill
March 05, 2006 at 7:33 am
WE ARE AT THAT stage in the political cycle when the supporters of the president, like Pejman Yousefzadeh, or even critics-with-a-book-out like Bruce Bartlett, start mourning that the 22nd Amendment—the one that limits the President of the United States to two terms—is severely cramping his power to get things done.
And well may they mourn. The glorious hopes of every political cycle inevitably evaporate into despair as “events, dear boy, events” conspire to prevent the president from changing the world. If only we could have got one more Big Push, the generals moan, we could have shoved the president’s agenda over the top.
America’s political philosopher, Lee Harris, in an elegiac piece for President’s Day, A Father without a Son, reminded us why we have a 22nd Amendment. It is because President Roosevelt violated the unwritten rule of presidential succession. In 1940 he ran for a third term.
Back in 1787, before we elected our first president, political opinion was sharply divided on the question of a chief executive. Americans knew, after the failure of the Articles of Confederation, that something stronger than a purely legislative government was needed. So the Constitution’s Article II declared that “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” But how, worried men like Thomas Jefferson, would we ever make the President go away?
After all, Jefferson was fully aware that the first President was going to be George Washington. Everyone knew that—just as everyone knew that the Presidency would remain in Washington’s hands for as long as he wished to hang on to it. Washington, elected once, was in essence elected for life.
Fortunately, Washington had no son, so even if he had stayed in office until he died, the Washington dynasty would have died with him. But Washington determined that “He would not die in office; instead, he would be elected for two terms, and then he would not run again.”
This noble renunciation of power served as a brake, a gentlemen’s agreement, that restrained the ambitions of presidents for nearly 150 years.
It was not until 1940 that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, after 8 years of failing to lead the nation out of the Great Depression, decided that he needed one more Big Push.
After FDR had broken the gentlemen’s agreement the nation was forced into an act of national hygiene. Congress passed in 1947 and the states ratified in 1951 the 22nd Amendment.
The great problem of the nation in 2006 not a lack of presidential power. It is the encrusted privilege and patronage of the welfare state, the government entitlements like Social Security and Medicare over which the Democratic filibuster guards with a passion equal to the old Southern filibuster of the 1950s. Yet at the height of his power in the months after reelection in 2004 the president was unable to get traction on Social Security reform. How would repeal of the 22nd Amendment have made any difference?
It is not political power that gets things done; it is the power of ideas. Rudy Giuliani was able to bring New York City back from the brink of meltdown in the 1990s because of the heavy lifting done by conservative thinkers, as Fred Siegel shows in The Prince of the City. It was James Q. Wilson and George Kelling who developed the “broken windows” policing that Bill Bratton implemented, first in New York’s subways and then on its streets. David Osborne’s Reinventing Government showed how state and local governments could do more by “scrapping rule- and input-driven bureaucracies in favor of stressing outcomes and accountability.” George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty showed that progressive taxation functioned as a tollgate on the road to the middle class, and Charles Murray’s Losing Ground “set the stage for welfare reform.” If Americans aren’t ready for Social Security reform it is because we haven’t persuaded them.
When conservatives have won the next battle of ideas the question of presidential power or of the 22nd Amendment will not matter. Just as the old Southern filibuster was routed by the civil rights revolution of the early 1960s, today’s welfare state filibuster will come to its deserved, inglorious end not because of presidential arm-twisting but because of the power of ideas.
What we can do with the president’s political power is cut taxes, cut, and cut again. And it just so happens that Senator John McCain, who opposed the president’s tax cuts in 2001, 2003, 2004, and 2005, is supporting the Tax Relief Extension Reconciliation Act. I wonder why?
For those Republicans still hankering after repeal of the 22nd Amendment, think of this. Absent the 22nd Amendment who can doubt that President Clinton, no gentleman and no George Washington, would have run for president again and again and finally handed off the presidency to his daughter?
Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists, she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
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©2007 Christopher Chantrill