A few weeks ago John McCain said that, if he elected President, he would make himself available to Congress for “question time” like the British Prime Minister does before the House of Commons:
COLUMBUS, Ohio (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate John McCain said on Thursday that, if elected, he would like to take a page from the British government and appear in question-and-answer sessions with lawmakers.
“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,” McCain said in excerpts of a speech he is to deliver later in Columbus, Ohio.
Although U.S. presidents deliver annual “State of the Union” speeches to Congress at the start of each year, those formal addresses do not include a question-and-answer session.
McCain said exchanges such as those in the British House of Commons are a way of holding leaders accountable.
Today, George Will stands up and points out why this isn’t necessarily a good idea:
[P]rime 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 reelection, do more delegating than legislating: Often the “laws” they pass are expressions of sentiments or aspirations that executive branch rulemaking turns into real laws. McCain’s proposal would further diminish Congress’s 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 from government made overbearing by the concentration of too much power in one branch.
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, especially regarding national security. 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.
Which is exactly what the State of the Union address has become, as Will points out:
[U]nder 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 message and drafted replies. Each was delivered, at different times, to him at his residence, and he replied to the 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 prime time, 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.
Rather than being a dialogue among equals, which is what British Parliamentary Question Time is since the Prime Minister is really just another member of the House of Commons, a Presidential “Question Time” would be yet another step down the road toward turning the Presidency into something that it was never intended to be.
