The federal government is constipated, according to William G. Howell and Terry M. Moe, two of the country’s leading presidential scholars and the authors of "Relic: How Our Constitution Undermines Effective Government and Why We Need a More Powerful Presidency."
Washington is, they argue, unable to act at all in many cases (for example, immigration); prone when it does act to “produce weak, cobbled-together patchwork policies” (Obamacare, the tax code); and uninterested in fixing these policies when they are “shown, through actual experience, to be ineffective” (New Deal farm programs). That’s a common enough description of the ailment that afflicts the body politic. Where Howell and Moe depart from the conventional wisdom is in their diagnosis: not partisan polarization or divided government but the Constitution itself. In their title quote, they write, “The core of the Constitution—separation of powers, with a parochial Congress at its center—…is a relic of the past.” Howell and Moe argue that what makes the Constitution a relic—fine for 1816 when the federal government was small, subordinate to the states, and not expected to do very much,
Subscribe Today
Our subscribers have first access to individual race pages for each House, Senate and Governors race, which will include race ratings (each race is rated on a seven-point scale) and a narrative analysis pertaining to that race.