Congress Voting Independence, a depiction of the Second Continental Congress voting on the United States Declaration of Independence photo: Liberty Forum
Congress and Deliberation in the Age of Woodrow Wilson: An Elegy by Greg Weiner Are we all Wilsonians now?
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eoconservatives, it should be said in fairness, brought the 28th President’s ideology through the front door in the plain light of day in the form of a moralized and expeditionary foreign policy. What few noticed is what got simultaneously smuggled in the back: a constitutional philosophy that suppresses Congress, elevates the Presidency and replaces deliberation and an awareness of human frailty—once staples of conservative thought—with moral certitude and an emphasis on power concentrated in the daring man of decisive action. Those who prefer simpler political pleasures—liberty is one, prudence another—have reason for concern. For them, this is a season for a reassertion of legislative prerogatives, of the not merely equal but paramount role the Framers assigned to the most— indeed, the only—deliberative branch of government: Congress. There are several reasons for partisans of liberty to resist the creeping Caesarism of the contemporary Presidency. One is that Publius’ principal concern is with power per se: its “encroaching nature,” as he says in Federalist 48. Power’s source is irrelevant to that inquiry: Danger attaches to wherever it is strongest, the
Fall 2013
legislatures in his day; the Presidency in ours. It has become commonplace for advocates of a strong executive to argue that extraordinary power can safely be lodged in the Presidency because the occupant of that office is accountable to the people. Yet in Federalist 51 Publius considers and explicitly rejects “responsibility” as an adequate safeguard against the tyranny of arbitrary rulers: “experience has taught mankind the need for auxiliary precautions.” Indeed, the fact that Presidential power proceeds from such a gushing font would be, for Publius, reason for caution, not carte blanche. This brief for restraining power by accountability alone is offered by those who also make rhetorical obeisance to the Constitution, but it is not the Framers’ argument; it is their opponents’. The anti-Federalist Centinel made it: Government should not be too complicated; elect leaders for limited terms, he wrote, keep them accountable, call it a day. So did President Wilson. His assault on constitutional forms in his classic tract Congressional Government was focused on accountability as the only necessary prophylactic to abusive power, arguments that echo today in the claim that the President is answerable for abuses of his office not to Congress but only to the people directly through the mechanism of election. Thus Wilson, arguing that AMERICAN OUTLOOK | 39