Understanding Our Constitution: #6 - Our Government Was Not Designed to Run Smoothly
It's common to hear people rail against government gridlock and inefficiency. "The feds, they can't get anything done, ever!" Indeed, the campaign against government waste and gridlock has been a hallmark of elections for decades. Candidates have risen to the presidency by promising they'll bring their business smarts to government, making it run better, faster and cheaper.
When I hear this complaint, I ask people to try a mental exercise. "Would you really like an efficient IRS, one able to audit every tax return, every year, which means yours?" Amidst the sheepish looks lies a silent awareness that, just maybe, efficiency might have its limits. Would Americans be truly grateful for a Congress that passes legislation quickly, a President who always signs it, and courts that always uphold it? If they would, they can find this kind of government - in Russia and China.
James Madison put the danger of that type of government best in Federalist #51. After acknowledging the obvious, that neither people nor their rulers are angels, he said that: "[I]n framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself." The solution, embedded in the Constitution, is to divide power, first between the states and the federal government and then within the federal government. Once divided, we count on human nature to resist encroachment on its power. "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place," Madison said. Welcome to a beautiful structure for governmental gridlock and inefficiency.
We are witnessing just such a contest of ambitions today. President Trump issued a national emergency declaration for the Southwest border. Congress disapproved it in significant part because they judged him as overstepping his Constitutional authority. He vetoed their resolution of disapproval, and now the courts will weigh in. How inefficient!
The words efficiency, effectiveness, speedy, cost consciousness, return on investment, and profit, hallmarks of a well-run, private sector enterprise, appear nowhere in the Constitution. But the words justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare, and blessings of liberty do. They form its Preamble. "Justice is the end of government," Madison also said in Federalist #51. Cost conscious, swift, and efficient justice can also be found in Russia and China, though how "just" it is remains quite debatable.
This is not an apologist defense of poor government. While efficiency is not the primary aim of government, some measure of it is still essential. It's a question of balance. How much liberty and justice are we willing to trade-off for more efficiency? For most Americans, it may seem to be quite a bit - until it's their liberty and their justice that gets compromised.
What bothers the critics of government inefficiency most, perhaps, is not just that government wastes too much of their tax money as that it can't seem to get anything done. It's that "ambition counteracting ambition" has paralyzed us. This is a valid concern, but misses an essential understanding. When government gets seriously bottled up by contending interests, it's not supposed to be able to get anything done. When we cannot agree on core values, principles, goals, and policies, in our American experiment in self-government, we should be wary of moving ahead quickly. The Constitution has embedded conflict in its operating system to ensure that not much happens until that conflict can be managed productively. We should look with fear at leaders who promise to wipe all that disagreement away by force of their personality or power.
The solution is the building of a broader understanding about who we are and where we want to go. It is leadership that promises - and can implement - not just more efficiency but more sincere communication, compromise, and consensus. It is leadership that sees gridlock not as a problem to be railed against but as a symptom of a society that is too fixed in extremes to find a middle ground.
Efficient governments, mostly in autocratic societies, move quickly to pass laws and harshly to implement them. Truly representative governments move slowly to pass laws and seldom need harsh measures to gain compliance. Indeed, the fact that Americans can count on their government machinery to move slowly and carefully is a hallmark of what the founders contributed to the world. Americans prone to complain about their government should be careful about what they wish for and take satisfaction that they can complain.
Photo Credit: Adam Fagen
