America approached the 2024 election like there were only two choices for the future of the country. Those two choices were two individual personalities championing the policies of two different political parties.
There actually was and is a third choice. It might not have been on the ballot, but it is within the power of the electorate to get busy working on it at any moment. That third choice involves not “What is our leader going to do?” but “What am I going to do?” It’s a little bit like President John F. Kennedy’s famous statement, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”
The third choice is something that neither party or candidate devoted any breath or resources to bringing up to the electorate as an option. In brief, that choice is to get back to doing democracy the way our constitutional law requires democracy to be done.
That document doesn’t say a word about social or economic policies like abortion or border control or grocery and gas prices, or energy development, or health care, or education, or technology, or crime and punishment. What it talks about is the ground rules for how the people of this country are supposed to actually pull off democracy. It is all about process, not policy.
If the people go through the proper democratic process, i.e., how they themselves are required to make the laws, then the policy by definition will be deemed good and representative and wise, because everybody had their say. That process is violated almost wholesale by both major political parties in America today. And that is why America was destined to lose this election no matter which political party won the vote.
The Constitution says it is the Congress that makes “all laws” coming out of Washington, D.C. Presidents of both political parties have veered heavily toward one man/woman making more and more of those laws, leaving the people’s representatives in the dust, and leaving rule of law in the dust.
The people figure the president is elected by all of the people, so what is the problem with the president proposing and pushing hard for all the laws and even decreeing a bunch of them, if the person is duly elected? The problem is, having one person propose and push all the laws and also make a bunch of them on his/her own puts too much power into one person’s hands. That is not how laws were made in this country when America was rising to pre-eminence in the world.
For a long time in our nation’s democracy, the president did not even let his views on a particular policy be known to the public, because he wanted to honor the constitutional process of the Congress making all the laws. His job, as the word “executive” suggests, was merely to execute the will of the Congress, not to compete with it or supplant it.
What if the one person making the laws turns out to be corrupt, or power-crazy, or lopsided in a particular policy area. The Congress can hammer out all the various views and build a coalition around each piece of legislation that considers the views of all the people in all the localities across the entire country. The president primarily represents the state he comes from and the donors who helped him get elected. He and his donors may have all kinds of blind spots that interfere with a proper, moderating position on issues.
When the Congress makes “all laws” that means tens of thousands of donors and dozens of different positions are carefully weighed and debated. When the president makes a law, one cigar-smoking donor representing one industry or company says to him, “Buddy, let’s do it this way. Everything will be just fine if we do.”
Or one unelected adviser says to him, “Pal, let’s punish those people who didn’t vote for us. Let’s make a law that destroys their livelihoods, their desired policies, and hurts them and their families personally.” It is much harder for the Congress to take this kind of retribution on individuals than it is for one vengeance-minded president.
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Robert Kimball Shinkoskey is the author of “The American Kings: Growth in Presidential Power from George Washington to Barack Obama.” (2014)
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Opinion: Author analyzes choices America made in 2024 election
