Kevin Williamson of National Review Online uses the occasion of John Boehner’s recent retirement announcement to pontificate on the diminished importance of the U.S. House speaker.
[T]hese United States are in the process of transforming the form of their union government from that of a democratic republic to that of a unitary autocratic administrative state. Barack Obama and other progressives have hastened that transformation in no small part because they consider the American constitutional order in purely instrumental terms rather than as a good in and of itself. Sometimes the constitutional order serves progressive ends and sometimes it constrains them, which is why President Wilson despised the Constitution and President Obama simply ignores it when he believes it necessary, adopting as he has — with rather less fuss than one might have expected — a Gaullist rule-by-decree model. The familiar ratchet effect is in operation: The Left in power expands the state, particularly the executive, and the Right in power does not reverse the turn, in part because conservative politicians like power, too, in part because reversing those expansions is difficult, and in part because even if conservatives win the fight there’s not much juice in it. …
… The president did not come to dominate American politics to this degree because the Constitution invests him with such princely powers, or because some law was changed somewhere along the way that set the presidency on its current course of metastasis. The president first dominated psychologically and culturally, and then came to dominate politically and legislatively. Ironically enough, Ronald Reagan — the great crusader against expansive government — had such an expansive and attractive personality that he left his successors a presidency much larger and more vivid than the one he inherited from Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter. (Ford’s modest conception of himself and his role produced a presidential quip for the ages: “I’m a Ford, not a Lincoln.”) When they write the history of American democracy, we’ll be obliged to admit the embarrassing truth that we lost it because it’s so much easier to pay attention to one man than to a congress of them.
Speaker Boehner’s successor inherits a diminished role in a diminished institution, and it isn’t clear that there is much of anything he will be able to do to help the national legislature recover its self-respect, which lags so far behind its self-importance. Congress no longer has the power to return the president — and the presidency — to its proper role. That power, too, is now in the hands of the president, which is why it is unlikely that our national slide into autocracy will be reversed until the current political equilibrium is disturbed, which is to say until certain danger encounters uncertain danger.
