By John Barry
Am I alone in thinking that Rep. Joe Wilson’s shouted comment to President Obama in the middle of his address to a joint session of Congress last night was a healthy sign? Rahm Emanuel, the president’s chief of staff, reportedly approached two senior Republicans immediately after the speech and said: “No president has ever had that happen. Ever. My advice is that he apologize immediately. You know my number.” Congressman Wilson (R-S.C.), chastened or perhaps merely pressured, did make the call, and later issued a public apology. But why?
OK, Wilson’s comments were way outside the bounds of civil debate. “You lie” would have got Wilson thrown out of any legislative chamber in the Western world. And whoever shouted “Not true” would also have suffered instant “suspension.” But other Republican shouts of dissent during Obama’s speech—“It’s true,” “Read the Bill,” and “Shame”—would have been reckoned fair comment. Yet here they have been greeted with shock and horror: evidence of “the insolence of House Republicans,” as Dana Milbank put it.
The notion that dissent, temperately voiced, was in principle out of place seems to me odd. This wasn’t a church service. It wasn’t a ceremonial occasion to celebrate some event inspiring or requiring national unity. It was a highly political address about a passionately contentious topic. It was laden with sentences carefully crafted to elicit applause from Democrats, while the TV cameras could show the Republicans sitting in surly silence. Why is silence thought the only proper means of dissent?
I'm from Britain. Despite my years here, I still find value in a rougher political culture. In Britain, the prime minister has to face the House of Commons every Wednesday afternoon to answer any and all questions posed to him. It’s a daunting ordeal. The PM and his staff swot for hours that morning to figure out what he may be asked and to dream up the most crushing answers—or, of course, the most evasive ones. One prime minister, Harold Macmillan, found the weekly ordeal so nerve-racking that he was physically sick as he prepared for it—and back then questioning of the prime minister came twice a week. (It was cut to weekly only in 1997.) Dissent, even heckling, are reckoned part of the baptism of fire the PM must face. Mastering this weekly inquisition is seen as a brutal test, in real time, of the PM’s grasp of the business of government.
Yes, I know. These are two different systems of governance. The House of Commons is a gladiatorial arena in a galaxy light-years distant from the speechifying to empty chambers that characterizes all-too-many supposed Congressional debates. The rival parties’ front benches confronting each other in the Commons are still spaced just sufficiently apart to be beyond the reach of a sword thrust. That’s an 18th-century precaution, but cut and thrust is still the style in Commons’ debates. And government is the better for it.
And, yes, I know that the British prime minister is only the head of government; whereas the president is the head of state. It is also true that when, in Britain, the head of state reads the Queen’s address to the two assembled chambers of Parliament, noises of dissent would be unthinkable. Even though that address is the political agenda of the ruling party.
But that’s a purely ceremonial occasion. In the subsequent Commons debate on the Queen’s speech, the gloves come off. Obama’s address last evening wasn’t an American version of the Queen’s speech. He wasn’t appearing as head of state, handing down nation-building sentiments from on high. He was talking as embattled leader of the ruling party. So why was dissent, politely phrased, out of order?
The episode, trivial in itself, perfectly illustrates what I think has become a real source of damage to American democracy: a confusion between the president’s two roles. More precisely, our failure to figure out a way to cope with them. The Founding Fathers saw the president as an aloof figure, above the turmoil of the two chambers of the legislature. George Washington, the father of the nation, was such a protean figure. But the role of the president has evolved beyond anything the Founding Fathers ever envisaged. Now, he is head of a vast and vastly powerful executive branch. He is, and is expected to be, an activist head of government—a prime minister as well as head of state.
So when does our head of government answer to questioning by the legislature? Unless he’s impeached, the answer is never. (The only real questioning the president ever faces is when he chooses to call a White House press conference. Even these have become such stage-managed events that their inquisitorial value is close to zero.) Increasingly, the president’s most powerful officials are similarly aloof from inquiry. Consider Obama’s bevy of "czars" and "presidential envoys" to handle multiple areas of domestic and foreign policy. As White House officials, they are beyond the reach of Congressional questioning. But why? What purpose is served by grilling some cabinet secretary, when the administration has already made it clear that real power lies with the czar above them? To adapt an old and vulgar proverb: why question the monkey if the organ grinder remains out of reach?
The debacles of the past decade surely show how damaging is this inability to require America’s head of government to explain and defend his actions, at the time, to the legislature. Suppose President Bush had been forced to answer tough questions back in spring 2003 about his arguments for invading Iraq? Or his decision to set up Guantánamo and fill it with detainees scarfed up from faraway battlefields? Or his decision to allow the methods of interrogation that he did? The questions he never had seriously to address quickly mount up. Had President Bush been required to come before Congress, on regular and frequent occasions, to explain and defend his decisions, the outcomes might have been no different. I suspect they would have been. What’s certain is that national debate would have been more informed, more searching, more inclusive—more democratic.
So, back to last night’s address to Congress. The debate over President Obama’s desire to change America’s health-care system would surely have been less beset by angry fantasies, less in thrall to paranoid conspiracy theories about "death panels," if the head of government had been required, over these past months, to face Congress at intervals and answer questions about what he had in mind? It’s an axiom of American civic life that open government is the best government. In an age when the frenzies of cable-TV and talk-radio demagogues command the audiences they do, it's time to wonder whether open government—the chief executive forced to explain and defend what he intends, and why he intends it—might be our best hope of keeping our national debates within the bounds of rationality and, yes, civility that the Founding Fathers hoped.
Health care outbursts certainly haven’t
been confined to Congress—for a look at dissent in the public square, check out our “Town Hall Face” photo gallery.
