Last Wednesday, Jan. 27, the nation turned its attention to another “major” speech by President Obama. With a tarnished political standing and a persona so pervasive that his rhetoric has begun to sound trite – even by modern political standards – President Obama asserted in his State of the Union address that Washington is both broken and all-powerful. He decried the corrupt and polarized nature of our capital and then, yet again, pointed to it as the only hope for our ailing nation.
According to the president’s speech, Washington is divided and full of self-interested politicians, yet must reform the health care industry. Washington is slow and inefficient, yet must restore full employment and economic growth. Washington is out of touch with average Americans, yet must lead the way in reforming the education offered to American children. Washington is a slave to the special interests, yet must fundamentally restructure our energy markets so that they are not rigged to enrich those special interests. The glaring discrepancy between diagnosis and prescription may not be obvious to the run of the mill, doctrinaire liberal, but it is becoming increasingly obvious to the average American.
Of course, Obama is certainly right that our capital is characterized by a tricky political terrain and bureaucratic obstacles that make it very difficult to force through the sweeping and transformative agenda he championed during his campaign. That the nature of the federal government makes it a challenge to achieve what he would like is no accident. Our founders understood that a government as powerful, and as coercive, as the federal government must be forced to act slowly, deliberately, and yes, at times, not at all. They codified an elaborate system of shared power. Each branch of the federal government is kept in line by the other branches, and no one person or group can dominate.
As a result, members of the government must accept constant conditions of simultaneous combat and compromise. Any new legislative initiative must both find support and counter opposition. While the inherent inefficiency of these checks and balances can be frustrating, circumventing them could threaten American democracy by allowing a concentration of too much power under one authority.
In other words, our federal system was deliberately framed such that the centralized government can both represent the great and varied interests of a sprawling nation, while simultaneously maintain a unified, stable and constitutional republic. The president – perhaps genuinely unable to conceive of how Congress, or the people, could possibly refuse his charm and promises of hope – complains of pettiness and obstruction at the cost of results and efficiency. But – Constitutional arguments aside – herein lies the problem: The only way for Washington to be free of conflict resulting from “ambition set against ambition” is to remove from Washington the potential for the swift and sweeping social restructuring of the Obama “big bang” agenda. Conversely, the only way for Obama to accomplish his agenda free from difficult and avid dissent is to follow in the footsteps of some presidents like Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt and attempt to disregard the Constitution.
The latter option, though undoubtedly tempting to an ambitious president and a liberal Congress, would almost certainly reach its demise with a newly reinvigorated Supreme Court, which, after the Citizens United decision, has seemed to find once again its role as guardian not of liberal values but of the Constitution. So Obama is left with one choice – the choice he should have made a long, expensive and tumultuous year ago. Dispense with the utopian vision for a society remade in the image of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). Retreat on promises to fundamentally reshape the national economy from the Oval Office. And give up on the hope of a new era of activist government resembling the New Deal. Washington’s partisan and divisive character has persisted through the terms of presidents far more popular than Obama. In a fit of poetic justice that brings chills, it is Obama who now requires change.
Jeffrey Long is a junior in the College. He can be reached at longthehoya.com. Conscience of a Conservative appears every other Friday.
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