Presidential Power, Presidential Supremacy (Book Notes: How Democratic Is the American Constitution?)

It has become common for presidents to claim to have a mandate from the people and to represent the will of the entire American public. They use such claims in order to justify pushing their ideas through Congress - presidents can't make law, so they exert moral pressure on those who can. Just how reasonable are claims about a mandate, though?

In How Democratic Is the American Constitution?, Robert A. Dahl writes:

However deftly Jefferson steered the Congress as he rode the tide of the democratic revolution, he never publicly challenged the standard view that the only legitimate representative of the popular will was the Congress, not the president. Nor did any of his successors, Madison, Monroe, John Qunicy Adams, lay down such a claim.

Andrew Jackson did just that. In justifying his use of the veto against Congressional majorities, as the only national official who had been elected by all the people and not just by a small fraction, as were Senators and Representatives, Jackson insisted that he alone could claim to represent all the people.

Thus Jackson began what I have called the myth of the presidential mandate: that by winning a majority of popular (and presumably electoral) votes, the president has gained a “mandate” to carry out whatever he had proposed during the campaign. [...]

Despite the frequency with which newly elected presidents stake a claim to a mandate, the closer you inspect the chain of assumptions that are supposed to support the claim, the more fragile the links appear. It requires an extraordinary leap of faith to infer the views of voters from nothing more than the way they cast their votes for president.

I think that we should pay particular attention to how the claims of Jackson (and, by extension, all later presidents who assert a “mandate”) seek to replace the deliberative process and body of Congress with the single office and person of president. It is true that a single Representative or Senator is only elected by a small fraction of people, but a president claiming a mandate like Andrew Jackson is trying to assert moral or political superiority to Congress as a whole, not some random, individual Representative.

If we actually look at Congress as a whole, do we find that it was elected by “just a small fraction” of the people? No — in fact, the aggregate votes for Senators and Representatives might be greater than those cast for the president. This would mean that the Congress, as a political body, has greater moral and political claim to representing the will of the people than does the president.

There is also the aforementioned issue of process: when people elect members of Congress, they are electing not just people, but people who will participate in a known, open, and observable political process for making decisions. A president claiming to have a mandate though, is not engaged in such a process. However they make decisions, whatever “process” there is, occurs behind closed doors and is not observable by the public.

Thus, claims to a presidential mandate and moral or political authority over the legislative process are a means for asserting the rule of a single person, governing according to an unknown process, over the rule of a deliberative body of representatives who are expected to govern according to a known process. Claims of a presidential “mandate” are, in some ways, an attack on the basic democratic process in America.

 

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