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McCain Would Diminish Separation Of Powers

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By GEORGE F. WILL Washington Post Writer's Group

The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 30, 2008

WASHINGTON - Most improvements make matters worse because most new ideas are regrettable, including this not-quite-new one from John McCain's speech depicting how improved America will be after four years of him: "I will ask Congress to grant me the privilege of coming before both houses to take questions, and address criticism, much the same as the prime minister of Great Britain appears regularly before the House of Commons."

But prime ministers sit in the House because Britain's system of government is not based, as ours is, on separation of powers. Granted, America's separation of legislative and executive powers has become blurred. Legislators overextended by their incontinent involvement in everything, and preoccupied with re-election, do more delegating than legislating: McCain's proposal would further diminish Congress' dignity by deepening the perception of its subordination.

Our constitutional architecture of checks and balances, as explained by the principal architect, James Madison, is: "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place." This design was supposed to serve various governmental functions - especially the protection of individuals' rights.

But the interests - primarily electoral - of legislators have become tenuously connected to the defense of the rights of their place. They are passive about courts setting social policies and supine when presidents act with anti-constitutional independence. Routine presidential appearances in Congress, of the sort McCain proposes, would further reduce that institution to just another of the stages on which presidents preen.

In a 2003 essay, Jeffrey Tulis said that under George Washington the constitutional requirement that the president "shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union" was a ceremonial dialogue. Washington reported in person, then both houses debated his words and drafted replies.

Jefferson considered it monarchical for the president to lecture the legislature, so he submitted a written report, as did every subsequent president until Woodrow Wilson. He was the first president to criticize the Framers' constitutional system of checks and balances as an outmoded impediment to presidents' freedom.

Today the State of the Union address is delivered over the heads of Congress, to the television audience. Truman was the first to deliver it on television, Johnson the first to place it in primetime, where it has become a spectacle that further miniaturizes Congress - the president's supporters repeatedly leaping up to bray approval while opposition members, their "response" already taped, sit in ostentatious sullenness.

This does not augur well for McCain's plan for another ceremony of inter-branch dialogue. Congress should remind a President McCain that the 16 blocks separating the Capitol from the White House nicely express the nation's constitutional geography.

George Will's column is distributed by the Washington Post Writers Group.

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