KING RON COMES TO RUNNYMEDE
Mr Reagan's embarrassments over Irangate have strengthened the hand of Congress in its two-century old struggle
for power against the President. By Nicholas von Hoffman
The Congress re- sponds to defiance as the Roman Senate did when challenged. But the better analogy is with Hanoverian England. The tension between Court and Commons is replayed In America where the enduring rivalry is between the presidential party and the Congressional party. It began in George Washington's time and it has never ended. The American polity, with its President ruling like a king whose ministers are not members of the House of Commons, crudely corresponds to that of England under the four Georges. Time and the evolution of the British constitution re- solved the tension between Throne and Parliament, but America has a written constitution which blocks gradual, un- spoken adjustments in the basic arrange- ments of government. In America the charter has to be changed by solemn and deliberate act, and that always seems to Americans to be a desecration of sacred texts, an injury to a God-given political patrimony. As a result, for two centuries the United States has stood, more or less frozen, as a republican version of the 18th-century British monar- chy. It is a tribute to the ingenuity of lawyers and other hair-splitting interpre- ters of the words penned on that piece of parchment that it functions at all.
The history of the system shows that the power of the presidency is less than that of Congress in the same way that, when push came to shove, king had to give way to Commons. This time the shove in Washington was inadvertent. Reagan and his courtiers were trying to sneak around Congress, not deliberately change the ba- lance of power as President NiXon had when he impounded and refused to spend money that Congress had directed be spent. Nevertheless, from the moment that the guns-for-hostages game was made public, the White House played into the hands of the congressional party. And, as if bearing sweetmeats and machine guns to Teheran weren't enough, the President's people announced they were toying with a new, `broad' interpretation of the anti-ballistic- missile treaty. Treaties in the United States are the peculiar province of the Senate, and, in a trice, Sam Nunn of Georgia, one of the most influential wearers of the purple-striped toga, announced it was con- stitutional crisis time. Congress, by direct demand, by publicity barrage and by other customary devices, organised to assert its primacy.
Earlier English political struggles illus- trate that the most effective way of render- ing the sovereign impotent is to take his ministers from him and make him accept those chosen by the Commons. That was what was going on in the campaign to chase Donald Regan, President Reagan's chief of staff and grand vizier, from office.
Since Regan had taken over in the White House, he sneered at the eminently sneer- able, often ludicrous 535 senators and representatives. They had already started gunning for him when the Iran controversy arose and the President was sent tumbling into confusion. In this endeavour, there was no distinction between the behaviour of the congressional Democrats and the congressional Republicans, although the Republicans took the lead in going after Regan. It was a bi-partisan effort. Just as Congress set off in full cry after the King's prime minister, the Queen Joined the hunt. Nancy Reagan, who had taken a grudging dislike to her husband's favourite for reasons wholly different from Congress, began intriguing against him in public by setting her particular friends in the press on him. Regan, who has the supernal self-confidence vouchsafed to those of strong prejudices and modest abilities, is a difficult man to love. Irascible and impatient, he had filled the White House with his own staff choices, referred to by outsiders as 'the mice', but was held in tenacious affection by the President, who listens to self-made millionaires such as Regan with admiring respect. Forcing the President to part with the man he had chosen as his closest adviser and official alter ego was an act of political castration. The exact chain of events lead- ing to Howard Baker's selection as the new chief of staff hasn't yet been worked out. The job was offered to at least one other former senator, the President's friend, Paul Laxalt. But in any event, Baker, the Pluperfect congressional man, was eased or muscled in, and on terms which make him considerably more than a prime minister for Baker serves less at President Reagan's pleasure than Congress's. The ancient poli- tical drama had been replayed and the King/President had been forced to accept the choice of the Parliament/Congress. On this occasion, however, the circumstances of the new man's arrival make him some- thing quite close to a regent. Howard Baker, never a true believer in the tenets of President Reagan's political faith, is a middle-of-the-road deal maker, a log-roller as they used to say. As such, he's an ideal man to entrust a regency to, for a lifetime in Congress has taught him to gauge how deep and how strong his sup- Port is before committing himself. This is not a battle-giver but a battle-dodger, a i man well suited for a role unimagined in the ordinary interpretations of American constitutional polity. But the triumph of the congressional Party isn't analagous in social and econo- mic terms to the supremacy of Parliament. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Parliament had a constituency in the country which ranged from Whig magnates to Adam Smith liberals.
In the United States, most Americans are unaware of the ancient partisan strug- gle between President and Congress. Con- gress has contacts and local alliances throughout the country in a way no mod- ern president, bereft of a functioning, grass-roots political party, has. Single citizens and large corporations find the easiest and most effective means of contact with big government is through a repre- sentative or a senator. There is a great affection for Congress throughout the country, and yet most people don't think of its members as being the protectors of a congressional party. Thus the installation of a regent to rule in the president's name doesn't betoken the success of this or that policy.
There have been, in the past, other moments when Congress has triumphed. In 1867, after several years of delirious political warfare between the president and the legislative branch of government, Con- gress attempted to appoint members of the cabinet in flat and open defiance of the written constitution. When President Andrew Johnson resisted, he was im- peached and came within one vote of being thrown out of office. Had this happened, the United States might have moved in the direction of a modern, European form of parliamentary government. It did not hap- pen and it kept to its elective monarchy.
In the 1920s, in reaction to the presiden- tial absolutism and internationalism of Woodrow Wilson, Congress more or less took over the running of foreign affairs. The Republican chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee became the de facto Secretary of State but to no great effect. This attempt at congressional rule dissipated itself and the two parties lived in reasonable harmony until the Nixon years when, again, the congressional party rose and for the first time succeeded in chasing a president from office. In his place came Gerald Ford, another politician with a lifetime of congressional association to preside over what was more of an interreg- num than an administration. Having got rid of Richard Nixon and the threat to its prerogative, Congress had no particular agenda of its own to pursue. Thus, it could only recede and wait for a new president and new proposals.
As regent, Howard Baker has no more of a mandate to push a programme through than Gerry Ford did, less in fact. Ford at least carried the title of President and inherited a competent cabinet that was in more or less harmonious working order. Baker must live with a cabinet chock-full of anonymous tweeps whose two loudest members, Shultz and Weinberger, preside 'To defend himself against the Left?' over staffs who have fought with each other for six, going on seven years. Yet without a mandate and modest intellectual endowments, Ford's time in the White House was successful enough for him to come within a whisker of winning an election in his own right.
Baker, a far brighter man, is a skilful, experienced and popular congressional leader with enough stature to be consi- dered a true presidential possibility. The negative side, whatever it may be, has yet to show itself.
In most regencies, everybody and every force connives against the regent,, lining up and jockeying for the day when the heir apparent reaches his majority. The Baker regency is a different proposition. Even those greediest for power have no motive for him to fail.
A Baker failure might result in a Reagan resignation, a chilling thought to most Republicans and all Democrats. Men and women in Washington who can't agree on anything else are united in their distaste and contempt for George Bush, who has trimmed not once but many times too often. No one any longer trusts him. For all potential Republican nominees, letting Bush into the White House might make it impossible to get him out later on.
The Democrats have even less reason to torpedo the arrangement. Having suffered for years from Ronald Reagan's popular- ity, they have no intention of pushing him out of the door now that he is becoming a Republican liability. From coast to coast the cocktail hour is loud with people arguing over whether Ronald Reagan is stupid, senile or just lazy. The extent to which this debate will slop over onto the next Republican candidate is problematic. Thus far, at least, nothing has happened to ruin Republican chances in 1988. Never- theless, keeping Ronald Reagan around must be of marginal help to the Demo- crats, while tossing him out gets them nothing but from Reagan supporters and people who will feel sorry for the happy-go-lucky old man.
For the nation at large, Baker's arrival looks like one more staff change. For much of the minority who follow politics it was, doubtless, a welcome one. The issues involved here are distant and abstract and are not the kind to convulse a public which has got somewhat wearied of the con- troversy. The discovery that Colonel Oliv- er North, the blinky-eyed marine who ran the cloak-and-dagger operation, had a fetching blonde secretary has helped keep the thing going. Penthouse immediately offered the girl half a million dollars to strip and get snapped, but that's another one day story. She refused. Just before nine o'clock last Thursday night, when President Reagan gave his I-made-a- mistake speech, Washington's restaurants emptied out as people headed home to the television sets, but elsewhere in America they kept on eating.
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