THE U.S. PRESIDENT
This Idea of an American ‘Question Time’
How to have more accountability in a congressional republic, without helping Fox
“The U.S. president is not a prime minister.”
I found myself saying this on social media, the best place to have discussions of comparative political cultures and institutions. I said it in response to the suggestion that comes up now and again that the U. S. Congress should have a “Question Time” for the president.
Four centuries of divergent development between the U.K. and the U.S. get flattened down to “You’re messed up, so, of course, you should start doing things our way.”
You say parliamentary, I say congressional
For British people, it’s clear that a healthy democracy needs “the leader” to face tough persistent public questioning from “the opposition” very frequently. This practice is a key part of how they define democracy. The point they want to make is “This obvious practice would have destroyed Trump”.
It’s obvious to me, as an American, meanwhile, that presidents are not elected as part of a parliamentary majority, but are elected in their own right.
The U.S. presidency, even as originally designed, is an odd third thing — neither monarch nor prime minister. The position is elected in its own right, not through a legislative majority. Yet the president is the leader of their party as well as the head of state.
I want to make it crystal clear, though: the U.S. is in a crisis of accountability. It’s more than legitimate to debate how to deal with that; it’s a necessity.
Yet the way to solve an accountability problem in U.S. national politics is to strengthen Congress.
The strongest possible Congress, with the strongest possible parties and a very engaged citizenry, is the way to restrain and hold the presidency to account. The cause of presidential accountability is served by Congress exercising its powers, both separately from the presidency and upon it. Congress held the presidency accountable in the Watergate scandal and the Teapot Dome scandal; its efforts against Andrew Johnson fell just short of accountability, but that was an energetic effort. Presidential accountability is not served by having the president come into Congress’s space once a week in a dynamic that would be gamed very quickly by anti-democratic forces.
Whatever party the president is from, whatever party the U.S. House Speaker is from (I assume that the supporters of this suggestion want the Speaker of the House to ask the questions?), in 2023, the video footage of this exercise would go straight onto Fox News.
Not in its original form, either. It would be spliced, diced, and otherwise edited with all the bells and whistles to benefit the Republican Party and the conservative movement. If we can imagine hypotheticals, where some British observers imagine an American Question Time bringing Trump down, I immediately imagine how thoroughly and methodically Fox would use both the footage and the sheer fact that Trump had been questioned at all as a way to boost him higher with the base and independents. That’s even without him going, “Quiet,” in that contemptuously imperious way of his in the 2016 Republican primary debates.
But let’s back up. How did the U. S. get to the sorry point where people could entertain this particular suggestion, whatever their understanding of the U. S. political system?
A king with an atom bomb (and spies)
When we talk about the unaccountable power of the U.S. presidency, in sheer scope we’re mostly talking about national security power.
The U.S. president has a constitutional role, spelled out in the plain text of the document, as the “commander-in-chief” of the U.S. military. This is for good and for ill. It’s the role James Polk and Theodore Roosevelt used to engage in imperialism in the 19th century and at the turn of the 20th. It’s also the role Abraham Lincoln used to fight the enslavers’ rebellion once they attacked the U. S. government itself.
But the national security state is a post-World War II thing, only recognizable to people living in 2023 in the form it grew into after the atomic bombings of Japan in 1945. In the postwar era, the U.S. president has been allowed to become the commander-king of the leviathan national security apparatus.
I think the U.S. national security state is nigh-immune to genuine critique at this point because U.S. conservatives and right-wingers have drawn an ideological marker around it so that it’s not part of “the government” but instead is a kind of national idol or totemic object. Meanwhile, American Boomer liberals are still so stuck in 1968 that when a Democrat holds the presidency, cabinet positions like Secretary of Defense automatically go to Republicans because the GOP is “the party of national security”.
These are political problems.
Pointed questions directed at the U.S. president in a public forum, by themselves, would not solve them. In fact, arguably, they would worsen them. “Why have you been soft on Iran and China?”, a GOP speaker might well ask a Democratic president. “Why do you love socialism and want to destroy America?” “When will your druggie son finally be charged for his crimes?” he might continue with Joe Biden.
With Barack Obama? Oh, dear, as the British might say. Just imagine.
Would a Democratic speaker even be able to ask questions of a Republican president over jeering from the Republicans? The only Democratic speaker during most of my own life has been Nancy Pelosi, and she is a notoriously poor public speaker (you may note the irony there). You might hope she would have grilled Trump — I suppose that’s the idea here — but I don’t see 1) her trying, 2) the effort amounting to much of anything, 3) Republicans letting her do more than the few seconds required for (almost assuredly lurid) meme-making.
And frankly, I don’t see this crop of Democrats asking Biden questions about the size of the U.S. military or why the Afghanistan withdrawal was a fiasco, let alone why Hunter Biden thought he could trade on his family name in Ukraine.
Yet if you wanted to make the U.S. presidency accountable, you would first and foremost concentrate on cutting down everything related to “national security” built up since the Truman administration.
Specifically, your goal should be the complete reworking of the National Security Act of 1947, starting with an actual direct, concrete definition of “national security of the United States”, under the credible threat of the complete repeal of the entire act. Remember, this piece of federal legislation — and that’s all it is — is what created and authorized the CIA and the unified military command that we now associate with the assertive powers of the presidency.
If it and its amendments are repealed, the presidency would start to shrink down to what it was in the New Deal. The “Department of Defense” could be renamed the original, and obviously more honest, Department of War. Without the National Security Act, the presidency is more clearly a set of institutions that a robust Congress can have entirely routine oversight of.
We know full well that in the realm of domestic law-making, the presidency is all but powerless without Congress, as intended. Ask LBJ before the March to Selma. Less dramatically, ask Bill Clinton or Barack Obama after their parties lost majorities.
The lady wasn’t for fighting
There is plenty that a Congress with a majority in the party opposite the president can do to check him or her. That majority just has to be comfortable asserting that power.
In that sense, I can sort of understand Stephen Fry’s remark that perhaps a monarch was needed in America after all — to oppose Trump. Of course, it was shameful that the speaker was so bad at her job that a non-American observer would feel the suggestion made sense.
But it’s not more radical than introducing a Question Time into the U.S. system, and it comes from the same combination of a lack of understanding of a foreign system, and that system itself not working properly.
When Congress is weak and when the speaker wants to be seen as upholding appearances of comity instead of the constitutional balance of power, a president can run indeed amok.
But in that case, how does bringing such a president before such a spineless congressional majority improve the situation? A body that is too weak to exercise aggressive oversight is going to become disciplined and assertive enough to say things to an imperious president’s face … magically?
What would aggressive contention, a real congressional check on a lawless president, have looked like? It would have looked like Democrats under Speaker Nancy Pelosi holding constant televised oversight hearings from 2019 through all of 2020. It would have looked like lots and lots of indictments for contempt of Congress. It would have looked like CNN making the Sergeant at Arms a nationally and internationally known celebrity who then was given more power.
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, he of the Bond villain dollar bill printing photo? Subpoenaed to testify to Congress.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the all-but-open Christian nationalist? Subpoenaed.
Scott Pruitt, head and enemy of the Environmental Protection Agency? Subpoenaed.
Bill Barr, Attorney General, and Christian Militant? Subpoenaed.
Not a crook, just the chief magistrate
What about the legal impunity of the presidency? It’s not a matter of specific federal law that a U.S. president can’t be indicted. The idea comes from two legal memos from an office within the Department of Justice. A vigorous, bold Congress could pass laws setting out the idea that indictment of a sitting president is possible under circumstances X, Y, and Z, with a specific enforcement mechanism and a contingency plan for the functioning of the government.
What if it’s a matter not of an indictment, but of Congress needing information from the president that she/he doesn’t want to give up? That’s what the existing subpoena power is for. We have that, right now, as you read this. If you ignore a congressional subpoena, that’s contempt, and it’s a crime. It needs more specific enforcement power, yes. The fine for a violation should obviously be much more than the current laughable $1,000. Yet members of Congress jeering at the president as he tries to answer culture war questions on the floor of the House isn’t the way to get it.
What about the president having corrupt financial dealings? Congress can, and should, pass a law mandating that all candidates who file to run for federal office must submit prior year tax returns for x number of years or the Federal Election Commission will have the power to reject their applications (and perhaps give them a fine in the millions of dollars). Congress could pass a law encouraging the states to keep such a person off the ballot. It could pass a law declaring the tax returns of a sitting president are public information and can be read into the congressional record.
Make Congress Great Again!
How do we get a Congress capable of being the first among the equal branches again? How do we get a Congress that is able to check the presidency without bringing in the president for a weekly charade?
Get congressional party leaders who have no memory of the mid-20th century white supremacist kumbaya. Get congressional party leaders who are exactly that — leaders of Congress and its interests and of their party and its interests. People who see themselves as being in healthy contention with, not deference to, the presidency.
I can’t speak to the GOP, which has moved nearly beyond the field of small-d democratic politics (another problem an American Question Time would not solve). The Democrats would need a new generation of leadership, as I wrote before.
They would need to stop “stanning” their own leaders and elder members, and start giving status and power to the caucus members who do the most assertive oversight against the presidency and the GOP — much more than rip up speeches while smiling on national TV. They would need to not only allow primaries against complacent, deferential members of Congress but encourage them. They would need to support legislation to expand the U.S. House and to allow C-SPAN to control its own video cameras on the floors of Congress.
A strong Congress with a majority that knows and protects its institutional and partisan interests, a vigorous Congress ready and eager to make law and oversee the U.S. state would have no use for inviting the president into its chambers to generate right-wing fodder. A strong Congress has all the tools it needs already, including the ability to make more.
