The Electoral College Saved the Election (2021)
The Electoral College Saved the Election
The Wall Street Journal; January 9, 2021
Scholars, pundits, and progressives widely despise the Electoral College. They think it antiquated, irrational, and undemocratic and argue for scrapping it in favor of a national popular vote.
But in 2020, when many hallowed American institutions submitted to street demonstrations and violence, the Electoral College proved a steadfast guardian of our democracy. It can’t solve our problems on its own, but has given us a measure of stability to try for ourselves. A national popular election in 2020 would have made our problems immeasurably worse.
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The Electoral College by Dawn’s Early Light (2020/2021)
The Electoral College by Dawn’s Early Light
Claremont Review of Books; Winter 2020/2021
Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? by Alexander Keyssar, professor of history and social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, is the most thorough study of our Electoral College debates ever written. Let the People Pick the President by Jesse Wegman, a member of the New York Times editorial board, is more selective and journalistic. Both books are serious histories, replete with drama and instruction. They defy today’s progressive conceit that we can “cancel” history and fashion the world all on our own. But they make the converse mistake of trying to settle a living debate with a romantic plotline.
Professor Keyssar is committed to the proposition that the past holds lessons for solving today’s problems. The problem he wants to solve is the existence of the Electoral College despite its manifold deficiencies. He says that he is not “directly” entering the contemporary debates over the merits of the Electoral College. But the premise of his book is an argument, not a research heuristic: in framing the College as a problem to be solved, he necessarily makes a claim regarding its merits. His history is overwhelmingly about the system’s flaws and failures, with only cursory, often grudging attention to its strengths and successes. The momentous election of 1860, when the Electoral College gave Abraham Lincoln a solid 59% majority in a four-candidate race where he won less than 40% of the popular vote, is mentioned in a single passing sentence and then brushed off: “Had New York not voted Republican, the election would have landed in the House.” That is the sly counterfactual, a specialty of anti-Electoral College polemics, in which the results of actual elections are selectively retabulated to produce an anomalous or terrible result. It is a trick that can be played with all but electoral landslides—and in landslides, election systems are unimportant.
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The Man Who Saved the Electoral College (2020)
The Man Who Saved the Electoral College
National Affairs; Winter 2020
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But there is an episode in Mike Uhlmann’s political career where his role was so singular and momentous that it could not possibly be gainsaid, although it could easily be forgotten (characteristically, he himself did nothing to memorialize it). Finding himself at a constitutional barricade in the summer of 1970, he successfully defended the Electoral College at a moment of maximum peril.
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The Constitution at 230: The Dangers of Letting Legislative Power Atrophy (2017)
The Constitution at 230: The Dangers of Letting Legislative Power Atrophy
The Philadelphia Inquirer; September 18, 2017
The Constitution of 1787 begins with its stirring “We the People of the United States” preamble, then turns to Article I, establishing a national Congress. The article takes up more than half the entire document. Article II, establishing the Executive, and Article III, establishing the Judiciary, are much shorter and less detailed.
The Framers devoted special attention to the Congress because it was the linchpin of their new scheme of government. ….
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A Trump-Ryan Constitutional Revival (2016)
A Trump-Ryan Constitutional Revival
The Wall Street Journal; November 26, 2016
A central purpose of the American constitutional scheme of checks and balances is to draw out the distinctive strengths of the two political branches, executive and the legislature, while containing their distinctive weaknesses.
The scheme has not been working well of late. The consequences are unbridled executive growth into every cranny of commerce and society, and a bystander Congress. We have lapsed into autopilot government, rife with corruption and seemingly immune to incremental electoral correction.
These pathologies were a significant cause of the Trumpian political earthquake. And one of the many astonishing results of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Republican sweep on Election Day is that they have set the stage for a constitutional revival.
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Our Corrupt Government (2015)
Our Corrupt Government
Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2015
This essay reviews three exemplary books on the corruption of our Constitution and government: A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption (Encounter Books, 2015), by Jay Cost, a talented political analyst and staff writer at The Weekly Standard; Saving Congress from Itself: Emancipating the States and Empowering Their People (Encounter Books, 2014), by the distinguished federal judge and former U.S. senator James L. Buckley; and By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission (Crown Forum 2015), by the eminent social scientist and American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray. All are splendid—imaginative, edifying, rousing; highly informed and vigorously argued.
Each begins with James Madison and his republican system, propounded in The Federalist and reified, substantially but not perfectly, in the original Constitution and Bill of Rights. The federal government, limited to a few indispensible tasks of nationhood, would be disciplined from within by multiple checks and balances, and constrained from the outside by an extended polity, where the sheer profusion of interests would necessitate compromise and moderation. Over time, however, Madison’s system was undone by political ambition, popular democracy, and judicial fecklessness. We’re left with “institutionalized corruption,” according to Cost; where Congress’s “ability to bribe the states” has “emasculated federalism,” according to Buckley; and with Murray’s “end of the American project,” brought to us by a “lawless legal system,” “extralegal state,” and “systematically corrupt political system” incapable of reforming the mess. At this point our authors turn refreshingly pragmatic—not one of them concludes by calling for a new constitutional convention. Their pragmatism, applied to finding a way around the edifice of incorrigible corruption they discern, leads in idiosyncratic directions.
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Competition and the Constitution (2011)
Competition and the Constitution
National Affairs, September 21, 2011
Is there too much or too little competition in American life? Does competition promote growth and progress, or selfishness and inequality? Is it fair and efficient, or does it merely let the strong prey on the weak? And what is the alternative? Can competition be tamed and improved by government and union power, or is that a recipe for lethargy and self-dealing?
These questions lie at the heart of today’s policy debates over reviving the economy, restructuring the financial system, regulating energy production, and reforming health care, education, and pensions. Each debate is cast in terms of the desirability of some particular government intervention intended to pursue broad goals like economic growth, financial stability, retirement security, or access to medical care or schooling. In each case, though, an essential and prominent feature of the proposed intervention is the suppression of competition.
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Beware the Erosion of Competition (2011)
Beware the Erosion of Competition
Philadelphia Inquirer, June 12, 2011
Competition is a fact of life–the driving force of biological evolution and a constant presence in all human interactions. It is also a method of organization, used to promote efficiency and excellence and to resolve conflict peaceably. Competition is the key to the success of private-market economies and is used in many other areas; for example, the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes spur competition in the sciences and in journalism. Even when we don’t like competition when we face it in our personal lives, we appreciate its benefits and admire it in action–from Steve Jobs to Li Na.
The American Constitution uses competition to promote good government. Regular democratic elections limit incumbents’ hold on power and open succession to outside competition. The “separation of powers” in our national government forces Congress and the president to compete for public favor and to balance each other’s excesses; the 2010 election is only the latest to demonstrate that Americans like their government divided.
Under our federalist system, states compete for citizens and employers by offering different mixes of schools, transportation, public amenities, regulations, and taxes–think of booming Texas versus bankrupt California. And the federal and state governments compete with each other, as in the current state challenges to the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and the federal challenge to Arizona’s immigration law.
The Constitution also protects and promotes private competition. The First Amendment is more than a matter of individual rights: it also ensures unbridled competition in the supply of news, religious faiths, political creeds, and information of all kinds. These are great goods in themselves and also keep political officials relatively honest and well-informed. And out of mischief: the First Amendment averts political-religious violence, stemming from the prospect of a state religious monopoly, of the sort that was common in England and Europe when the Constitution was drafted and that remains a terrible problem in the Arab Muslim world today.
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Competition in Government (2006)
Competition in Government
Presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, August 31-September 3, 2006
Competition is essentially a process of the formation of opinion: by spreading information, it creates that unity and coherence of the economic system which we presuppose when we think of it as one market. It creates the views people have about what is best and cheapest, and it is because of it that people know at least as much about possibilities and opportunities as they in fact do.
—Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Meaning of Competition” (1946)
Whenever we praise or condemn a government program or advance a proposal for reform, we are always positing some principle for choosing good policy. The economist says that policy should promote economic efficiency—the maximum output, measured by value to consumers, from a given input of scarce resources. The political scientist may say that policy should fairly represent the views and interests of citizens as mediated by political institutions they have consented to. For libertarians, the overarching standard is individual freedom; for conservatives, it is the preservation of time-tested social norms and institutions; for liberal communitarians, it is some version of social equality, social justice, or social solidarity.
These are academic and philosophical criteria, elaborated and argued over in scholarly texts. In practical politics, they are simplified and given populist twists. Conservative Republicans often say that policy should promote “economic growth.” Promoting growth is different from promoting efficiency or freedom, and the difference has a political purpose—to build popular resistance to redistributionist policies by focusing attention on growing the pie rather than dividing the current pie. Liberal Democrats often say that policy should promote the welfare of the poor or disadvantaged—which may or may not accord with academic conceptions of social justice, depending largely on electoral considerations. Interest-group lobbyists often assume that preserving the environment or the family farm or the prerogatives of teachers unions are self-evidently desirable, but the best of them attempt to tie their parochial interests to broader principles such as growth or fairness. Citizens who are neither economists nor philosophers nor politicians tend to want it all: efficiency and equality, growth and fairness, freedom and justice. Politicians understand our dilemma and try to help out, emphasizing that their programs would achieve all good things and downplaying the trade-offs among them. Especially as election days approach, conservatives are compassionate and liberals are fiscal skinflints.
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Unlimited Government (2006)
Unlimited Government
The American Enterprise, January/February 2006
It was typical summertime in Washington last July—temperature in the 90s, humidity in the 80s—yet the living was anything but easy. President Bush announced on prime-time television his nomination of Judge John Roberts to the Supreme Court, and Congress and the entire capital city sprang briskly into action. The next morning, senators appeared before throngs of reporters to pronounce on the nominee’s qualifications, pundits and interest-group spokespeople hit the TV studios with their spins and admonitions, and lobbyists buzzed about the implications for their favorite legislative causes. By dinnertime the first responders had laid down the parameters for the confirmation battle to come, and the nation had begun to take the measure of the young jurist.
Thus began another national debate over the contemporary meaning of our Constitution—conducted over the airwaves and Internet and in the op-ed pages, culminating in Senate hearings in September where Judge Roberts was lectured and quizzed on Supreme Court case law by senators reciting from cue cards. But in many ways it was the sheer alacrity of the initial response rather than the substance of the ensuing legal arguments that said the most about current Constitutional practice. For the highly orchestrated announcement and responses took place during a season when, for much of American history and by deliberate design, Congress and the White House would have been closed for business and Washington deserted.
Thomas Jefferson played the pivotal role in choosing the site for our national capital, and selected what was essentially a malarial swamp. He had been in Paris when the Constitution was drafted, and he was not much impressed by its parchment provisions for limited government. So—anticipating the old dictum that “no man’s life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session”—Jefferson added a climatologic backstop. Long, miserable summers were to serve as a natural deterrent to the growth of our national apparatus.
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Some Advantages of Competition in Government and Politics (2004)
Some Advantages of Competition in Government and Politics
Unpublished paper, March 2004
The subject of my talk is competition. That may sound like I’m going to talk about economic policy and business issues, but the focus of my remarks will be on politics and government organization. Like many Americans, I have been reading that China’s political leaders and many academic experts have been discussing ideas for political reform. When Americans talk about political reform, it is usually in terms of freedom of the press, minority rights, and political parties. But I want to suggest that the principle of competition offers an alternative way of thinking about these issues, applying a well-know economic idea to the realm of government and politics, that may be helpful in the Chinese context.
In economics, the advantages of competition are well understood. The principle advantage is efficient allocation of resources. When many suppliers compete for the business of consumers, prices gravitate toward costs of production and scarce resources are used for those goods and services for which there is real demand. Competition thereby produces maximum economic value from given resources, and uses minimum resources to supply a given demand.
That is the teaching of price theory, worked out in graphs and formulas in economics textbooks. If you dig down into the theory, you find two aspects of the competitive process with important practical implications. The first is that competition is essential to producing accurate knowledge and putting it in the hands of people who can use it. This is the advantage explained by Friedrich A. Hayek in his landmark essay, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” published in September 1945 the date that marks the intellectual end of socialism. Hayek pointed out that socialist economics assumes that government planners possess accurate information about conditions of demand and supply throughout an economy. If the assumption were correct, then socialism would be a more efficient means of organizing an economy than competitive markets, with all of their duplication, waste, and chaos. But the assumption is wrong, actually more than wrong: it elides the most important problem any economic system needs to solve, which is the problem of discovering and transmitting true information. No government planner, no matter how intelligent, well-educated, and well-staffed, could possibly collect and keep up-to-date the information necessary to make an economy function properly. The advantage of the market is precisely that the competition consumers bidding for right to use resources for particular purposes, and suppliers bidding for the right to fulfill those purposes, generates highly precise information that otherwise would not exist at all, updates it continuously in response to ever-changing needs and technology, and provides it to those who can put it to productive use.
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