American government fundamentals and structure

American Government

QUESTION ONE (Interest Groups): There are a number of political experts and observers who believe interest groups - or, according to Democracy Under Pressure (Cummings, 224-241), also called the "power elite" - in reality are the forces that make public policy at the federal level. And so, with this system entrenched, it will not be easy to change the way power is wielded in American government dynamics. Cummings writes (225) that "...lobbyists for interest groups are able to exert influence by means of campaign contributions and fund raising" (229), how healthy is that for the average consumer who just wants fairness and honesty in government? it's unhealthy, and difficult to change.

What changes could be made to reduce interest groups' influence? First of all, Cummings (241) asserts that "...if American Democracy is to become more responsive to the needs of its citizens, the nation's legislators must find new ways to heed the voices of..." people living in poverty, minorities, consumers across the board, "ordinary citizens" and "the powerless." Meanwhile, from what authors assert in the book, the Challenge of Democracy (Janda, et al., 342), chances for change are bleak. "...Business and professional groups have an advantage" in the interest group game because they have more money and "the ability to organize more rapidly..." The bottom line is that changes have not been made to alter the fact that "...interest group[s] clearly compromise the principle of political equality."

U.S. Senator John McCain writes in Newsweek (McCain, 2004), that despite the passage of the McCain-Feingold campaign reform legislation, "soft money...the corrupting, virtually unregulated slush funds..." which was supposed to be banned from federal elections are being used anyway by so-called "527" interest groups. What change is needed, in McCain's view, is "fixing the FEC" (Federal Election Commission). The FEC has shown "a despicable failure to do its hob...and has refused to take on those who brazenly thumb their noses at the law," McCain writes. So, one way to change the bureaucracy is to enforce existing laws against undue influence, and beef up the agencies whose duty it is to enforce those laws and regulations.

QUESTION TWO (Electoral College and Elections): The most recent example of the built-in unfairness of the Electoral College was the 2000 Presidential Election. While Al Gore won the popular vote, George W. Bush "won" the highly contentious Florida vote to take the most Electoral College votes.

In reality, had the U.S. Supreme Court not put a stop to the hand counting of disputed ballots in Florida, overturning the Florida Supreme Court's decision to allow the counting of disputed ballots to continue, Gore may well have won the Electoral College by squeaking by in Florida. This answers one of the questions - "How democratic is our electoral process and the Electoral College? - from #2 by pointing out how unfair it was from the Gore campaign's point-of-view that a) Gore clearly won the popular balloting by over a half-million votes, and b) Gore basically lost the race for the White House on a 5-4 vote of the U.S. Supreme Court, five Republicans voting for Bush in the Bush v. Gore lawsuit, and four Democrat justices voting for the Gore side of the argument.

In the Challenge of Democracy (Janda, 408-409), the authors note that "The most troubling aspect of the electoral college is the possibility that, despite winning a plurality or even a majority of popular votes, a candidate could lost the election in the electoral college." Janda goes on to mention that this situation has happened "in three elections"; the book was published in 1989, eleven years before it happened again. "This peculiar feature of our system," the authors continue, "has led to calls for the abolition of the electoral college... [because] it is wrong to have a system that allows a candidate who receives the most popular votes to lose the election."

The bottom line for how America elects presidents was arrived at by the framers of the U.S. Constitution: in Democracy Under Pressure (Cummings, 367-68), authors write that "only a few delegates to the Constitutional Convention felt that American Democracy had matured sufficiently for the choice of the President to be entrusted directly to the people"; and hence, direct voting for president took a back seat to the electoral college.

QUESTION THREE (Presidents' staffing strategies): Janda writes in the Challenge of Democracy (415-16) that the president chooses a "chief of staff" - the person who controls access to the president, and who has the complete trust of the president - as both an administrator and an advisor on "crucial political choices." The kind of individual chosen for this important position reflects the president's attitude towards the daily business of government; an example of this is H.R. Haldeman, Richard Nixon's chief of staff, who "ran a highly disciplined operation...prodding staff members to work harder and faster," Janda explains.

Rather than riding herd on staff, Jimmy Carter's chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, was quite different, according to Janda: "his primary job 'was to settle interagency conflict and make sure that the implementation of presidential policy was well supervised'." That reflected Carter's more relaxed use of power, as juxtaposed with Nixon's tough, iron-fisted control-type approach to staff. In the case of Nixon, his top staff also exhibited a tendency towards secrecy, which played out on the national stage during the Watergate scandal.

White House staff depend "entirely on staying in the president's good graces for their survival," Cummings explains (408-09), and "their power is derivative, though nonetheless real" and it is "not uncommon in the White House to see a cabinet member wanting to confer with a member of the president's staff."

As far as the question - "What effect does such organization have on the management and direction of government?" - some White House staff serve as "links with the executive departments and agencies, channeling problems and conflicts among the departments to the president." Others advise the president on politics, patronage, and appointments, and write his speeches for him. President Dwight Eisenhower's system was "tight" and formal, with his chief of staff "screening all problems and deciding what the president should see" (409). A staff that is too protective, Cummings writes, may cause the president to "become isolated" from the outside world, which can be detrimental to the direction and image of the executive branch.

QUESTION FOUR (Domestic and foreign policy-making): The president has plenty of power in domestic policy-making: he can create legislation; lobby using the power of his office to cajole Congress to pass his legislation; threaten to veto or in fact veto legislation he does not approve of; he can use the "impoundment of funds" (Cummings, 403) to avoid spending money on programs he disapproves of. The president has too much power in matters of foreign policy, however. In fact, the Cummings narrative (430) mentions three important guidelines a president is expected to follow when developing and carrying out foreign policy; "Drawing on a range of advisers and opinions"; "not acting in unnecessary haste"; and "rigorously examining the chain of reasoning that has led to the chosen option, ensuring that presumptions have not been subconsciously equated with what is actually known to be true."

That last guideline is very pertinent to any objective analysis of the decisions and "chain of reasoning" that led to George W. Bush's decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003. Were presumptions "subconsciously" or otherwise "equated with what" the Bush administration knew to be true? Was there a rigorous examination of the "chain of reasoning" that led to his decision to attack Iraq?

According to a 692-page report to Bush from the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, U.S. intelligence agencies were "dead wrong" in their assessments of Iraq's biological, nuclear and chemical weapons; further, the information apparently given to Bush prior to the attack on Iraq was "either worthless or misleading," according to the Washington Post (Pincus, et al., 2005). The analysis of the alleged threat of Saddam Hussein - to have weapons of mass destruction and possible nuclear weapons - was "riddled with errors," the report concluded. The war Bush launched "toppled a dictator but turned up no such weapons" - and even though the report was not designed to lay blame on Bush for going to war with incomplete information, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said "the investigation will not be complete unless we know how the Bush administration may have used or misused intelligence to pursue its own agenda."

QUESTION FIVE (Presidential power in the 20th Century; presidential "greatness"): Cummings writes that the president of the U.S. "has available to him a formidable array of tools, money, and manpower." That includes, "in ever widening circles," a huge White House staff of advisors, counsellors, experts, which was mentioned earlier; the "Executive Office of the President (a conglomerate of presidential sub-staffs)"; the vice president and his enormous staff of advisors and experts; the cabinet - "thirteen cabinet departments" - and the "many other agencies of the executive branch." Then there are the "...5 million employees of the federal bureaucracy and the military" at his disposal.

Also, the president runs the executive branch of government; Cummings writes that he is "chief of state" - the "ceremonial and symbolic head of state as well as head of government" (391) - as well as being "chief executive" of the government. He has the power to "grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States" (394), he has the power to declare war, and as Franklin Roosevelt showed during WWII (397), the president can "exercise extraordinary power over food rationing and the economy, only partly with congressional authorization." The president is the "Chief Diplomat" (Cummings, 398), the president has "sole power to negotiate and sign treaties" (399), the president "has the sole power to recognize or not recognize foreign governments" (400), and both the "arrows and the olive branch depicted in the presidential seal are available to him, a good example of how presidential roles overlap."

What is presidential greatness? The best answer for that question would be a logical one and that is presidential greatness is measured by how many positive things the president accomplished during his time in office. Certainly there can be no doubt Franklin D. Roosevelt achieved "greatness" given his programs to dig the nation out of the Great Depression (Social Security, and many more), his leadership during WWII, and his ability to stay in close touch with the citizens through frequent press conferences and his "fireside chats."

QUESTION SIX (Impeachment): The language regarding impeachment is "scattered in four places" in the U.S. Constitution (Cummings, 420), and "leaves many unanswered questions." The Constitution does say the president must be convicted of "Treason, Bribery of other High Crimes and Misdemeanors" (420) in order to be impeached. The way it works is, the House of Representatives brings impeachment proceedings against the president, after debate and discussion, and it only requires a majority vote to bring impeachment against a president.

The U.S. Senate actually holds a trial on the impeachment issue, and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court presides over the trial as judge. Two-thirds of the Senate must vote to impeach and move the president, and, in the impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton, the Senate could not muster the two-thirds votes necessary to remove him from office.

One of the problems in the impeachment proceedings is understanding (Cummings, 421) whether or not the "high crimes and misdemeanors" must "literally be crimes in the legal sense," such as breaking real laws, or whether "serious abuses of the office of president" actually falls short of impeachable crimes.

Cummings mentions in his narrative about impeachment that the Congress generally avoids having to go through impeachment because, for one reason, impeachment could be used as a partisan weapon if he (420) "displeased a Congress controlled by the opposition political party." Also, he is the person elected by "all the people," and that in itself brings reluctance on the part of Congress, an institution where unpopular decisions made can bring retribution during the next election cycle.

QUESTION SEVEN (Deliberate, slow speed of Congress in making decisions): In the book Government by the People (Burns, et. al, 411-412), the authors state that Congress receives some outside criticism because, "by its very nature is controversial and argumentative," and there "is a lack of agreement on what the primary functions of Congress should be." Should Congress be making policies, debating them, keeping an eye on the president's powers, investigating issues?

Critics point to several facts "to support the charge that Congress is woefully inefficient," the authors write. Part of that inefficiency is that "procedure in both chambers - especially in the Senate - is often very slow and cumbersome," the authors assert. "Much of their time" is consumed with "time-wasting activities, such as running errands for individual constituents or making speeches to an almost empty chamber," Burns continues. Specifically, Burns charges that the three-quarters of an hour it takes to call roll in the house is a "specific example of inefficiency."

The authors suggest that though the "slow, incremental pattern" of making decisions has more up-side than down-side: "The main reason for slow, cumbersome procedure is the congressional tradition of protecting the rights of minorities and individual legislators. This tradition is an important one." The expressing of "opposing and unorthodox views" must be tolerated, and those take up a lot of time, plus, "some of the inefficiencies in Congress have nothing to do with Democracy," Burns writes on 412. And Burns concludes, on page 413, "in terms of sheer output alone, its performance is impressive...the amount of work done is remarkable."

Cummings (475) writes that despite the lumbering pace of progress, and the scandals, and the fact that Congress has given up more and more power to the executive branch, "Congress does a fairly good job on the whole." When Congress is divided on an issue "and fails to act," Cummings explains, "it is because the country is divided on that issue." The answer to the question posed - "Do the disadvantages of the slow, incremental pattern of decision-making..." By Congress outweigh the advantages?" - has to be no; the advantages of the methodical, sometimes painfully slow process of legislation and oversight definitely outweigh the disadvantages.

QUESTION EIGHT (Speaker of the House; Majority Floor Leader; Majority Whip; filibuster; logrolling): The Speaker of the House, according to Burns' book (384-85), has the authority to "grant or withhold recognition to those who wish to speak," he settles "parliamentary disputes...appoints members of select and conference committees, and in general directs the business on the floor." Cummings (489) explains that the Speaker also appoints members of committees "that conduct special investigations," and he is the political leader of the majority party in the House. The speaker has "two chief assistants," Cummings explains (490), "the majority leader, chosen by the party caucus, and the majority whip... [the majority leader] is the party's floor leader and a key strategist. Together with the Speaker and members of the House Rules Committee, the majority leader schedules debate and negotiates with committee chairmen and party members on procedural matters."

Cummings describes the role of the "majority whip" as working with "deputy whips" (they don't really use actual whips, of course, but they are supposed to "whip up" action on the floor of the House; the term "whip" derived from "whipper-in" who, in England, was the one to make sure the hounds didn't stray during the fox hunt) to gather votes for specific legislation, and to "count noses" (490) to see if there are enough votes to pass a given bill.

"filibuster" (Janda, 375-76) is used by a Senator to delay an action; it can be reading out of the Bible, or just talking on any subject to hold the floor and prevent the opposing party from passing a bill, or in the case of the recent filibusters by Democrats in the Senate, they filibustered to delay Bush's selection for federal judges. The Democrats, in these controversial filibusters, contended that the judges Bush nominated for lifetime positions were not qualified, were too ideologically conservative (and not "mainstream"), and the Democrats also complained that the Bush Administration had not released all available information about the voting records of these nominees. "Logrolling" (Janda, 378) is when a legislator agrees to support a bill by another member, if that member will support the legislation promoted by the first legislator. It is a "You scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours" approach to legislation.

QUESTION NINE (Committee system in Congress): There are several kinds of committees in Congress: "Standing committees" are permanent (Janda, 365-66) that have a specialization in one area, such as the "House Judiciary Committee" of the "Senate Environment and Public Works Committee." There are 16 standing committees in the Senate, and 22 in the House. "Joint committees" have members of both the House and the Senate; "select committees" are temporary, set up to deal with "special circumstances" (Janda, 367); "conference committees" are not permanent either, and are designed to negotiate differences between legislation in which the House has one version, and the Senate has another version.

The advantage of committees is that, without committees, legislation would not be able to move through the House and Senate, but on the other hand, Janda writes (370), "...government by committee vests a tremendous amount of power in the committees and subcommittees of Congress - especially in their leaders." Janda makes that point about the leaders because one of the "disadvantages" of the committee system is that committee chairpersons and committee members can "bury a bill" by failing to report it to the full House or to the Senate. Let's say a farmer in Iowa is finding it very difficult to get a profit from his dairy farm, and his elected representative "Gary" in the House knows very well when his constituents are suffering financially as a group, so he has introduced legislation to institute "price supports" for milk products. But the committee chairman who must act on that legislation is upset with "Gary" for not supporting a bill the chairman introduced a month ago; so, the chairman holds the bill hostage until "Gary" comes around to support the chairman's pet legislation.

This situation described above is the disadvantage (to the electorate), or, the downside of committee power in Congress. But partisanship will always be part of the dynamic of committees; for example, Burns (375) explains that when party leaders dole out committee assignments to incoming legislators, those decisions are geared towards giving "each new congressman an assignment that will help him get re-elected." In this case, re-election is a priority more than the quality of stewardship that a given representative may be able to offer in a given committee that he or she may have expertise in.

QUESTION TEN: (Apportionment and gerrymandering): According to the U.S. Census Bureau (www.census.gov),"Apportionment is the process of dividing the 435 memberships, or seats, in the House of Representatives among the 50 states." The Census Bureau provides the American population data at 10-year intervals, and after each census, the bureau uses the results for "...calculating the number of House memberships each state is entitled to."

In Burns' book, Government by the People (Burns, 378-379), he explains that gerrymandering is an attempt to gain more control - or to hang on to control - by changing the boundaries of districts to favor the party in power, and also drawing the boundaries "of districts in such a way that that...the opposition's votes are concentrated in a few districts and thus wasted." gerrymander may result from the fact that the concentration of registered Democrats in a given district (evidenced by data from the Census Bureau) has moved into suburbs east of the original boundaries; and if the Democrats are in power in the House, they may wish to gerrymander and move those boundaries eastward to make sure they maintain their congressional power in that state.

A recent example of the use of political power (gerrymandering) to re-draw congressional district boundaries to favor the political party in power happened in Texas in 2003, according to an article in the Houston Chronicle. The Republican Majority Floor Leader in the House, Tom Delay, of Texas, pushed through a plan that ultimately took three Congressional seats away from the Democrats; the Democrats had 17 representatives in the House to 15 for the Republicans prior to the power play by DeLay. After the power play, the Republicans enjoyed a majority of 18 seats in the house, to 14 for the Democrats. The way in which the power play took place - three years after federal judges had done non-partisan apportionment-based redistricting (by using U.S. Census Bureau data from 2000, which is standard government procedure) - was so seeming unfair from the Democrats position that their entire delegation took two "vacations" (to Oklahoma and New Mexico) to deny the Texas Legislature a voting quorum, and hence delay the vote to cut their party out of 3 congressional seats (Williams, 2003).

QUESTION ELEVEN (federal bureaucracy): It may not be fair and may not be accurate but the image many American taxpayers have of government "bureaucrats" (Cummings, 432) is "self-important but inefficient petty officials wallowing in red tape." And the irony is, that as Cummings points out (433), Americans tend to be "against 'Big Government' in the abstract, but demand all kinds of government services." And in order for government to offer all those services, there must be many layers of bureaucracy, including executive departments. "Independent executive agencies" (Cummings, 452) include agencies whose heads are appointed by the president, and may be removed by him. NASA, the CIA, the Selective Service system and the Veterans Administration (VA) are examples of independent executive agencies. The VA provides important services to those who have served in the armed forces and among those vital services are medical services.

Independent regulatory commissions: The Federal Communication Commission (FCC), like other commissions in this category, is supposed to be "outside the direct control of the White House so that they are free from the pressures of the political process and the partisan considerations that shape it" (Janda, 445). Still, the FCC is not "immune to political pressure," because the president appoints new commissioners, and in the case of the Bush Administration, commissioners have been appointed that tend to support the notion that a media company should be able to own a TV, radio, and newspaper interest in the same metropolitan area, a policy that had previously been frowned upon.

A government corporation like the U.S. Postal Service is established, Janda explains (445) because "Congress has decided that the public would be better served if they have some link with the government..." and, the government believes "Americans need low-cost, door-to-door service for all kinds of mail, not just for mail on profitable routes or mail that requires special services."

QUESTION TWELVE (the IRS, FBI, U.S. Census and pressure brought to bear on those agencies): The Congress "...shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes," according to the U.S. Constitution (Cummings, 634), and the Internal Revenue Service makes sure - or at least tries its best - that all income earned by Americans is taxed to the full extent of the tax codes. In 1913, the 16th Amendment to the Constitution was passed, permitting the federal government to "levy a general income tax" (634); prior to that, the Constitution only allowed the federal government to collect income taxes "in proportion to state population," Cummings' narrative explains.

The U.S. Census Bureau has the job of not only count the people living in the U.S., but to "make population projections for the future" (Cummings, 668). As mentioned earlier in this paper, the Census Bureau's figures for any given congressional district within any state can and often does determine where boundaries will be determined in terms of the political landscape.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), along with the CIA, "have had a great deal of freedom from formal and informal congressional constraints because of the legitimate need for secrecy in their operations." But the independence and arrogance that the FBI showed during the J. Edgar Hoover period, and even afterwards, is gone, following the events of September 11, 2001. To answer the question posed for #12, tremendous bureaucratic pressure has placed on the FBI since revelations that it missed key clues leading up to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. According to CNN.com (June 10, 2005), "The FBI missed at least five opportunities before the September 11 attacks to uncover vital intelligence information about the terrorists," the article asserts. The Inspector General of the Justice Department issued the report, which indicated that an FBI agent had a theory that Osama bin laden "was sending students to U.S. flight training schools," but nobody in the FBI followed up on it. Also, the FBI did discover "the presence of hijackers Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar in the U.S. shortly before the attacks," but did not conduct an investigation on the two with "much urgency or priority." With these embarrassing reports coming out, the FBI should be, and is, under pressure for their poor decision-making strategies.

QUESTION THIRTEEN (Supreme Court): What is adjudication? Adjudication, according to the Concise Law Encyclopedia, is "giving or pronouncing a judgment or decree...also the judgment given." Basically, in the case of the Supreme Court, it is what a court passes judgment on, what kind of judicial work a court does. How does the Court decide on which cases it will hear? The Constitution gives the Court "the power to consider 'all Cases...arising under this Constitution'" (Cummings, 522). The Court has "original jurisdiction" to hear cases involving "foreign diplomats or cases in which one of the 50 states is a party." But the cases the Court more often decides to take are under its "appellate jurisdiction," which are cases that are "appealed on the grounds that they concern violations of constitutional rights" (Cummings, 530).

The Court can, Cummings continues, dismiss those appellate cases if they have no substantial "federal question involved." The most frequent cases that come to the Court which it may decide to accept come in the form of "petitions for a writ of certiorari (a Latin term meaning 'made more certain')" (Cummings, 530).

Two of the principles that have been used in the process of interpreting the Constitution include: 1) Chief Justice Earl Warren's view in Brown v. Board of Education (Cummings, 173): "Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other 'tangible' factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does"; and 2) when the Court was asked to rule on over-crowding in prisons, where three men typically held in cells designed for one man, but the Court ruled 8-1 that "prison overcrowding is not forbidden by the Constitution" (Cummings, 541). The Burger Court said that "harsh" prison conditions were "part of the penalty that criminal offenders pay for their offenses against society."

QUESTION FOURTEEN (Burger Court v. Warren Court): "...By 1984, it was clear that conservatives frequently formed the majority on the Burger Court" (Cummings, 515), and in the 1984 cases reviewed in the Cummings book, Democracy Under Pressure, the Court gave more power to police. That would be a clear example of the Burger Court's "ideological bloc," beefing up law enforcement. After all, Ronald Reagan, a conservative president, had made a big issue out of stemming the tide of crime and making neighborhoods safer places.