By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
President Barack Obama has promised to make an unconventional State of the Union speech
tonight, and it is a safe bet to assume that by “unconventional State of the
Union” he means “conventional campaign speech,” heavy with his trademark alloy
of intellectual shallowness and risibly inflated self-regard. In 2008 it was
“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” but we just can’t wait for them to
leave.
Here’s a better idea for an unconventional State of the
Union address: Don’t have one.
My detestation of the unseemly spectacle that is the
State of the Union address is something that I have aired at some length and,
having expended my store of relevant vituperative adjectives, I won’t repeat
myself here. Suffice it to say that it has ceased being a republican update on
the condition of the country and has turned instead into a monarchical Speech
from the Throne. Its influence is . . . well, here’s an observation: I know a
lady who very much wants to have a child, and she has an app that counts down
to her moment of maximum potential fertility; Wolf Blitzer has the same thing
for the pending State of the Union address, counting down from days before the
cursed event. That’s horrifying, and I’m embarrassed for Blitzer, for CNN, for
America, and for my species.
George Washington, who had excellent republican manners
but retained a certain sense of ceremony, fulfilled his constitutional duty to
give Congress an annual update by making a speech before the two houses. Thomas
Jefferson, who was a bit more French in his republicanism, simply sent Congress
a written report, and that was how it was done until the rise of Woodrow
Wilson, the puffed-up miscreant who attempted to establish a kind of
Bismarckian autocracy in these United States with the royalist pomp and ceremony
to match. It has been downhill since then, with presidents ranging from Ronald
Reagan — no stranger to showmanship — to the current milk-livered clotpole
leading the event’s devolution from bad theater to third-rate circus.
As a question of taste, the State of the Union is
indefensible. But there is more than the aesthetic objection.
We as a nation have for some time been on a dangerous
trajectory toward autocracy, with the prerogatives, powers, and privileges of
the legislative branch — the lawmaking branch — steadily hijacked by the
presidency, under presidents of both parties. This partly has been the result
of abject congressional cowardice, with legislators punting the details of
lawmaking to the executive with vague legislation simply empowering
executive-branch bureaucrats to make rules. Often it has been the result of
active executive predation, e.g., President Obama’s habit of justifying illegal
executive overreach by complaining that “Congress won’t act, so I must.”
“Congress won’t act” is just another way of saying “Congress won’t do what I
want,” and Barack Obama, the great constitutional scholar, doesn’t seem to
understand that refusing to do what the president wants is a big part of what
Congress is there for. We need three equal, legitimate branches of government,
each functioning in its proper constitutional role — or we’ll end up with that
Bismarckian autocracy that Wilson wanted.
Or worse.
A big part of the reason for the collapse of American
politics onto the single point of the presidency is the unhappy fact that
people are — forgive me for pointing it out — kind of lazy and a little bit
stupid. Congress, with its hundreds of players, committees and subcommittees,
and complicated processes is difficult to follow, and difficult to understand.
Lyndon Johnson made his career not on charm or brainpower (though he had
thoroughly corrupt concentrations of both) but on having mastered procedural
arcana, becoming, in biographer Robert Caro’s famous phrase, “Master of the
Senate.” That’s a hard thing to do if you are lucky enough to be one of the
people with a decent full-time job as we approach Recovery Summer VIII. But the
president is just the one guy. Anybody can have a plausible opinion about one
guy. We’d had a unitary executive in the public mind long before that phrase
made its debut in constitutional law.
Centralizing the state in the person of one man is
dangerous and foolish. The governing of the United States of America, and the
management of our relationship with the rest of the world, presents questions
of enormous complexity, far beyond the abilities of one man, or one man and his
team, even if we imagined a president and a cabinet full of saintly
super-geniuses embodying the best traits of Albert Einstein, Adam Smith, and
Mother Teresa. (Which the current gang . . . doesn’t.) Men are corruptible, and
more prone to error than to admitting error. This has been known for a long time,
which is why legislatures were created, and why our government is divided
against itself — three branches, with the legislative branch further
subdivided.
Presidents come and go. But the presidency has become a
problem.
Senator Ted Cruz is said to have memorized the
Constitution. That’s a neat trick, but there is something that we can say about
him that is even more impressive: He has internalized, deeply, the American
constitutional order, its beautiful machinery and delicate balances. A great
professor of mine used to press us undergraduate peons to live up to the
scholarly standard expressed by a Hebrew phrase meaning “to have eaten the
book,” and Ted Cruz is a man who has eaten the Constitution, and the
Declaration of Independence, the Federalist
Papers, and much else. No president is much inclined to reduce the power
and the status of the presidency per se, but in my mind the great virtue of
Cruz’s candidacy is that one can imagine his doing that as president. Senator
Cruz does not suffer from an excess of humility, but he has a mind to
understand why the presidency needs some. The current president is a lost
cause, but the presidency is not.
Senator Cruz is not attending this year’s State of the
Union address. He ought to go one step further and promise that, if elected
president, he won’t make one. He can deliver Congress a written report. He
could post it on Facebook, for all I care, “majesty of the office” be damned.
We could do with a good deal less “majesty” in Washington and with an infusion
of honesty and competence.
Somebody should kill this hideous and depraved
dog-and-pony show. If not the next Republican president, then the speaker of
the House, who has it within his power to simply decline to proffer an
invitation to address Congress. It would be a small and mainly symbolic — which
is not to say insignificant — move toward restoring the proper balance in our
government.
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