The Imperial Congress/The Fettered Presidency/Honest Graft
Rabkin, Jeremy A. & Jones, Gordon S. & Marini, John A. & Crovitz, Gordon & Jackson, Brooks
Republicans, reducing their number of committee seats, their opportunity to introduce amendments, and so on. Small wonder that Republicans be-came, in Barnhardt's phrase, "a placid minority."...
...What, then, does it take to restore the Good, the Rue, and the Beautiful to dear old Siwash and Southwest Behemoth State...
...If Coelho couldn't get money by asking, says Jackson, he got it by exerting political pressure...
...One is for giv-ing the President enhanced recision authority...
...One moment he is the kindly padre, the next moment a cold-blooded Machiavelli," writes Jackson...
...Both PAC contributions and out-of-state donations to House and Senate candidates should be banned...
...Pro fessor, I knew Lucky Jim, and you're no Lucky Jim...
...Once again, the suspicion is abroad in the land that countless professors are loafing through seven-and-a-half hour weeks, watering curricular stocks, ped dling seditious doctrines, cavorting like billyhell in the dormitories, and flum moxing the taxpayers...
...None, however, study the multibillion dollar legislative branch ap propriation...
...There's a reason that Dem-ocrats do so well at politics...
...llvo more modest suggestions are ap-pealing, at least to me...
...Don't colleges require chapel and cold showers anymore...
...The editors of The Imperial Congress, Gordon Jones, a former vice president of the Heritage Foundation, and John Marini, an associate professor of politi-cal science at the University of Nevada-Reno, plead for something that George Bush is unlikely to give them soon, a confrontational presidency "He can do so by informing the electorate and mobilizing it against an entrenched Congress, much as Franklin Delano Roosevelt mobilized the country against an unresponsive...
...But he always got it, even if the money had to come from sleazy savings and loan buccaneers...
...Try though we may to dispel our illusions about men and institu tions, we civilians want to believe that the professoriates foremost obligation is the teaching of undergraduates...
...This wasn't helpful...
...T ony Coelho again deserves spe-cial mention, along with Sen...
...Coelho is smart, extremely gregarious and likable, and deeply par-tisan...
...Admittedly, this is nice work if you can get it...
...When you add up Nunn's foreign policy ventures in the 1980s, they amount to a concerted assault on presidential power, and on a President, Reagan, who wanted to ex-ert that power in America's behalf in the world...
...Jackson also advocates lifting the ceiling on how much parties can spend on races...
...Jackson is une quivocal...
...Supreme Court in the 1930s," they write...
...If Nunn was out front, as he was in opposing Tower, they were safe in lining up behind him...
...As dirty little secrets go, this scarcely ranks with buggery and coprophilia...
...Each of these books offers remedies...
...What they lack in generosity, they don't make up in subtlety...
...Surely, this is by now common knowledge...
...His successful fight against John Tower as Bush's defense secretary belied his image...
...18.95 Kent Owen igher learning, particularly the 1 1 stuff called liberal education, captures the attention of literate Amer-icans at odd intervals...
...Under enhanced recision, the funds would be cut unless Congress voted to save them...
...Its magical power lifts earnest strivers to tenure and endowed chairs, grants and honors, modest fame and transcon tinental glory...
...And the flimsy of gossip...
...Why isn't Con-gress doing something about all this...
...It means the President cannot worry about his 'place in history.' " I'm not holding my breath...
...q PROFSCAM: PROFESSORS AND THE DEMISE OF HIGHER EDUCATION Charles J. Sykes/Regnery Gateway/304 pp...
...But just for the record, the antics of the picar esque prof belong to the overworked genre of the poison-ivy novel, and not to the leaden chronicles of actual institutions—at least not since the hey day of Timothy Leary at Harvard...
...Even Bush, if he gets desperate enough, might be willing to give this a try...
...They should take a look, he says...
...What Nunn also did was provide political cover for liberals...
...Nunn's action made it plain to foreign powers that in America there were two governments and two foreign policies, Reagan's and Congress's...
...Give them half a chance to show that the public isn't getting its money's worth from higher education, and they are all for laying waste to every faculty in sight...
...Let our Olympic athletes make a so-so showing against the East Ger-mans, and the guardians of physical culture summon that paragon of in-spired amateurism, George Steinbren-ner, to champion the cause...
...And "the burden would . . . be on Congress to reject savings proposed by the President," writes Margaret N. Davis, an aide to GOP Sen...
...They're better at it than Republicans...
...Populist resentment misses the point about professoring...
...Sam Nunn...
...Let the Soviets steal a marchinto outer space, and the nation moves heaven and earth to remedy our defects in science and tech-nology...
...For three years Nunn blocked the Army from develop-ing a new tactical nuclear missile...
...Phil Gramm, in The Imperial Congress...
...Indeed, the very word, professor, conjures images of medicine-show hucksters, dancing masters, and whore house piano-players...
...Wonder of wonders, it begets the aggrandizement of entire departments and colleges and univer sities, all thrust ever upward by the force of destiny...
...He'd have nothing to lose but the pleasure of Jim Wright's company...
...When the President asks Congress to rescind funds, all Congress has to do now is ignore him and funds stay...
...And to what end...
...This encroachment on executive authority is truly breath-taking," insists Richard Perle, the former Defense Department official, in The Fettered Presidency...
...Moreover, we keep alive the sentimental fiction that at their heart colleges and universities are devoted to a noble call ing...
...Despite what Kent Owen is The American Spec-tator's Indiana editor...
...In any in-stitution that styles itself a university, and in more and more colleges of marginal quality, the governing pur-pose demands the output of scholar-ship and research, which can be off-loaded in publications bearing the im-primatur of the guild...
...No doubt, sulking populists- in every era stay mean as weasels because they despise any form of superior in-telligence except shrewdness...
...Let the President use the bud get process to focus on the expanded size of Congress and the ways that this bloated expense account is employed by Congress to re-elect incumbents and finance the subcommittees that intrude on executive branch prerogatives...
...Horowitz singles out the annual appropria tion for Congress, a bill the Presi dent normally signs without a second thought...
...Still, it is a fact of academic life that even today the laity can barely get straight...
...What is to be done...
...If this be foolishness, we take com THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1989...
...This would give the President a kind of line-item veto, but it's not as repugnant to most members of Congress...
...Inevitably, when there is not quite enough to complain about with Arma-geddon a long way off, Americans get around to blaming colleges and univer-sities for our present discontents: the decadence of leadership, the squalor of mass culture, local outbreaks of stupid-ity...
...But that's not the whole story...
...How dare these shiftless professors betray the public trust...
...Why can't universities graduate people civilized and humane like us...
...Michael Horowitz, a Washington attorney who was a senior official at the Office of Management and Budget un der Reagan, proposes a clever political ploy in The Fettered Presidency...
...But the money would come from the federal treasury, a bad idea...
...I agree with the first part, so long as the $1,000 limit on individual contributions is raised or, better yet, revoked...
...Are we going to stand for the corruption of the in-nocents...
...It involves making enemies, in the press, among the in-telligentsia, in Congress, even in certain quarters of the President's own party...
...Anyway, Jackson's book is great reading, a primer on the role of money in politics and on the shrewdness of Democrats like Coelho...
...Who could criticize...
...He forced Reagan to agree to a strict interpretation of the ABM treaty, even though it hadn't been debated at all when the treaty was ratified in 1972...
...Honest Graft tells in riveting detail—Jackson was granted extraordinary access to Coelho's meetings and memos—how the congressman from rural California saved House Democrats from realign-ment...
...Most academics are compelled to grind away at their benches by decanal foremen and task-masterful colleagues...
...Richard Hofstadter taught us about anti-intellectualism in America, the reason for lese majeste is the old democratic nose-thumbing at preten-sion, not disdain for the life of the mind...
...He proposed refining but not jettisoning the blatantly unconstitutional War Powers Act...
...Righteous indignation—that most self-indulgent of civic virtues—strains its nostrils whenever the spoor of academic misdoing turns fetid...
...But this should have been clear before, especially to jour-nalists like me...
...There are 250 budget examin ers at OMB, including one who spends part of his time on the Battlefield Monuments Commission budget," says Horowitz...
...Nunn is a separate case, a Democrat noted for being objective and non-partisan...
...Why, sir, it is the Great End to which all perforce must endeavor: Academic Prestige, a lustrous state of being, conferred by word of mouth and note of foot...
...No matter how paltry the subject, crabbed the writing, or dull the thought, an article must out...
...He did it mainly with money, something that Democrats once had trouble raising...
...But what they work at hardest seldom advances the learning of their students...
Vol. 22 • May 1989 • No. 5
