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The legislature, and in particular the House, being more democratic than the executive is a bedrock principle of American democracy. Read the Federalist Papers
by idlewords 2y ago
The legislature, and in particular the House, being more democratic than the executive is a bedrock principle of American democracy. Read the Federalist Papers if you want a full theoretical grounding and justification of why from the framers' perspective.
- mmooss 2y agoThank you. Might you give us a summary, to tide us over until we read the entire Federalist Papers? :)
- idlewords 2y agoUnder the OG Constitution, the House was the only branch of government directly elected by the people, and therefore most accountable to them. The terms were short (biannual) so that legislators would regularly be held accountable and easy to replace. A lot of the other machinery of government was put in place as a check on all this democracy, so that momentary passions and demagoguery couldn't bring down the government through a kind of mob rule. The founders further recognized the special democratic legitimacy of the House by giving it the sole power to impeach and to propose legislation that spent money. You can fairly characterize the framers' attitude as "the democracy is coming from inside the House", both for good and ill. The strong presidency we know is more a function of precedent (set by Washington, Adams and especially Jackson) than an explicit feature of the Constitution. Whether Congress or the executive would have primacy was an open question for the first few decades of the country's history.
- mmooss 2y agoThat's a great point about the original House and Senate; I agree. I don't know that it makes the president less democratic than the House. I suppose presidents weren't directly elected either, via the electoral college, etc.
- tptacek 2y agoEverything else aside, and this is kind of unrelated to the points 'idlewords is making, but: in modern political theory the big problem with the executive doing this stuff vs. the executive branch is that the regulatory process in the executive branch is driven almost entirely by a combination of unelected appointees and unelected career staffers, usually guided by a bureaucratic public comment hearing process that provides just a faint approximation of representation. That's why you'd want Congress to do this and not the FCC, because Congress is directly representative, and decisions inside the FCC are overwhelmingly made by people nobody elected; the best you can say is that some of the highest-ranking of those people are traceable to appointments by an elected official. The flip side of this, of course, is that Congress is gridlocked and is unlikely to pass sweeping new regulations of any sort. That's a fair point! But I think I side with the court on the notion that you gotta fix that problem, rather than have the FCC pretend it can step in for Congress when Congress isn't moving fast enough.
- mmooss 2y agoAgain (and again), that ignores the fundamental fact of governing a country of 340 million with only 540 elected officials. Whether they are elected to the legislature or the executive, the only solution is delegating the vast majority of decisions and actions. How else do you propose solving that problem?