Coattail Congressmen?
BARNES, PETER
WASHINGTON-U.S.A. Coattail Congressmen? By Peter Barnes The initial euphoria on Capitol Hill over President Johnson's endorsement of a four-year term for congressmen has now...
...Or would a four-year term amendment-like the 23 rd Amendment allowing District of Columbia residents to vote for Presidential and Vice-Presidential electors (but not for the officials who could provide better schools for Washington's Negroes), and the 24th Amendment, abolishing poll taxes in Federal (but not state and local) elections-be little more than a waste of legislative time and effort...
...There would, it is true, be more time to work on bills with a fouryear term, but the powers-that-be who actually shape legislation in the House have plenty of time as things are...
...Since we do not have a parliamentary system, wherein new elections are called if the chief executive is defeated on a major issue, a four-year President-cum-House would be immune to electoral pressures for an unseemly, if not undemocratic time period...
...Whatever the motive, Johnson recited several arguments in favor of the proposal...
...One is that, faced with a mid-term election clouded over by the Vietnam war, the President suddenly became very appreciative of the advantages of a four-year mandate...
...But Hamilton and Madison wanted a three-year term, not a four-year term, and would have been appalled at an amendment seeking to alter the sacred independence of the three branches...
...But political feasibility aside, would a four-year term really break the pre-Johnsonian "deadlock" of democracy...
...A strong President backed by a four-year coat-tail majority in the House is hardly the kind of system likely to make Representative Gerald R. Ford (R.-Mich...
...The members of the "congressional Establishment" who are berated for holding up progress find it just as easy to get re-elected in Presidential election years as at mid-term...
...But all the arguments, stated and unstated by Johnson, avoid the real issue involved in the proposal for a co-terminous President and House of Representatives...
...The aim of the liberal reformists is to make life easier not for the campaign-weary congressman, but for the man who inhabits the White House...
...that jet-age transportation and modern postal service keep congressmen in constant touch with their districts, without the stimulus of an election...
...There are more plausible explanations...
...Perhaps, after all, what matters is that a constitutional amendment such as Johnson now supports is virtually a political impossibility...
...The road to a better Congress lies in new laws and changes of internal rules and ethics...
...Peter Barnes covers Washington for the Lowell, Massachusetts Sun...
...As Burns unambiguously put it, the purpose of choosing congressmen only in Presidential election years would be to allow each "Presidential party" to "convert its congressional party into a party wing exerting a proper, but not controlling or crippling hold on party policy...
...It is hard to escape the conclusion that a four-year term amendment would be the third next-tomeaningless constitutional alteration in a row...
...and Professor James MacGregor Burns have been urging for years...
...Quite to the contrary, Johnson's first two years in office have shown every sign of making Burns' Deadlock of Democracy more of an anachronism than the snuff boxes on the Speaker's podium, as Burns himself, in a speech last week in New York presenting his new book, Presidential Government, implicitly conceded...
...To Senator Clark the "congressional party" is the "congressional Establishment...
...Nor is it the panacea espoused by many long-term liberal congressmen, who feel that frequent consultations with the electorate, though bothersome to candidates, are a sine qua non of democracy...
...Endorsement of the Clark-Burns idea by Johnson, who up until 1960 was the embodiment of congressional autonomy, not only comes as a surprise but raises the question, Why...
...Senate liberals, who have been notoriously unsuccessful in abolishing the filibuster, will have an even harder time winning two-thirds approval for the Johnson amendment-especially since the plan, as it now stands, would allow House members to challenge senators in non-Presidential election years without risking their House seats...
...Their loud huzzahs at this unexpected recommendation all but drowned out the catch-line in Johnson's speech: "concurrent with the term of a President...
...One-third of the Senate would face election at mid-term, but other than that, popular dissatisfactions-which do crop up even in these days of the muchheeded public opinion poll-could be expressed only in the press, in unread letters to congressmen, or in street demonstrations...
...Quadrennial House elections concurrent with the balloting for President are of course exactly what liberal reformists like Senator Joseph S. Clark (D.-Pa...
...Hamilton and Madison wanted lengthy terms for the congressman so that he could attain "a certain degree of knowledge of the subjects on which he is to legislate...
...The "congressional party" is essentially an obstructionist conglomeration of local interests and feudal baronies concerned mainly with perpetuating the rule and power of individual members of Congress...
...that state governments have steadily lengthened the terms of their legislators and executive office-holders...
...The congressmen had been braced for a State of the Union address ringing with calls for guns, margerine if not butter, and a good deal of belt-tightening-but nothing so instantaneously pleasing as the pipe-dream of not having to face the voters and big campaign contributors every 24 months...
...Of all Presidents, Johnson is the one who least needs the benefit of a co-terminous House of Representatives...
...By Peter Barnes The initial euphoria on Capitol Hill over President Johnson's endorsement of a four-year term for congressmen has now been replaced, fortunately, by a more sober recognition of the proposal's full implications...
...Did he want to insure that he would not outshine future Presidents (he specifically made it clear that he does not want the necessary constitutional amendment to take force until after his second term expires in 1972) who lack his unsurpassed talents for dealing with congressional egos, or who do not have the good fortune to run against a Barry Goldwater...
...who has been protesting "rubber-stamp" for months-and his conservative colleagues leap in the air with joy...
...Would it, in other words, have accelerated the enactment of the income tax, child labor legislation, unemployment compensation, Medicare, Federal aid to education, or today, home rule for the District of Columbia...
...In fact, scarcely 100 of the 435 representatives have to give serious consideration to getting returned...
...For this, all that is needed is the will, and a majority vote...
...So was it, then, Johnson's sense of modesty, or generosity toward those who succeed him, that prompted this gesture...
...It would "attract more men of the highest quality to political life" and "strengthen the work of Congress" (both, in fact, are debatable points...
...He might have added that there is a growing trend towards professionalism in almost every line of work...
...The Johnsonian magic, however, may not be possessed by his successors...
...There is, to be sure, much validity in the liberal-reformist assertion that congressional minorities have all too often frustrated the majority will, which is best embodied by the President, the only American official whose election is truly a national plebiscite...
...If congressmen are beset by too many administrative chores, they can vote themselves a staff increase, or create an Ombudsman to handle voters' complaints...
...In the Johnsonian landslide of 1964, there were only 85 new faces in the House, and many replaced congressmen who retired...
...To Burns the "Presidential party" is the "good" wing of each of the two major parties, with coherent national policies developed in the national party platform...
...This serious problem can be remedied more effectively by simple statute than by constitutional amendment, and Johnson himself has indicated the way by reviving President Kennedy's proposals for tax incentives for the "little guy" to make political contributions...
...Yet this does not mean that the answer lies in amending Article 1 Section 2 of the Constitution...
...Similarly, the problem of facing those big campaign contributors, and willy-nilly becoming indebted to the vested interests, will not be solved by reducing the frequency of House elections...
...Help from Johnson would be invaluable here...
...Full and effective disclosure laws, accompanied by realistic limits on campaign expenditures, are a necessary corollary not requiring ratification by threequarters of the states...
...There is no need to clutter up the Constitution...
...But his quadrennial elections amendment, while it might reduce headaches for future Presidents and thin-plurality congressmen, would hardly improve the Constitution...
...It would relieve members of Congress of the tedium of having to "divert enormous energies to an almost continual process of campaigning" and leave them "more time to learn and more time to master the technical tasks of legislation...
...House liberals were able to establish a 21-day rule last year, breaking the power of the House Rules Committee, only by a 224-201 vote, well below the two-thirds needed for a constitutional amendment...
...and assorted other arguments used in advocating four-year terms...
...Proponents of the change have gone scurrying back to Madison and Hamilton, somewhat in the fashion of Communists seeking sanction for revisions in Marx...
...Another is that he needed a non-Great Society bone to throw out to congressmen (and especially to his loyal freshman Democrats) to break the general gloom of the State of the Union message and the hard year ahead-and what better flattery than to tell them that were it not for Article 1 Section 2 of the Constitution, all congressmen could be as statesman-like as senators, which is what most of them aspire to be anyway...
...Perhaps, also, the proposal was intended to give liberals some bargaining power when the unsinkable Senator Dirksen's anti-reapportionment amendment rolls around again...
Vol. 49 • January 1966 • No. 3
