In praise of gridlock

Pundits tell us that Americans de- spise “gridlock.” The only problem is that they seem to vote for it just about every chance they get.

We know all about how the Democrats took the House of Representatives with room to spare a couple weeks ago, essentially halting a Republican president’s agenda in its tracks for at least the next two years (to the extent it wasn’t already halted by a Congress controlled by his own party). But that will simply make the months between now and January 2021 something of a “return to normalcy” in American politics, similar in basic arrangements to 37 of the past 50 years wherein one party controls the White House and the other controls at least one chamber of Congress, to reliably obstructionist effect.

Democrats can claim, with some justification, that there was more than just orneriness motivating the electorate this time around, that the results indicated a clear voter desire to block an odious president. Republicans made the same claims, with at least equal credibility, after the two previous midterms.

On the surface all this seems fundamentally illogical for political scientist types— voting for a president from one party and for members of Congress from the other whose chief goal will be to foil whatever that president wishes to do and then complaining that the resulting stalemate prevents solutions to supposedly pressing problems.

The possibility exists, however, that our penchant for divided government reflects constitutional architecture driven by fear of centralized authority; that those who constructed that scaffolding had good reasons to prefer the kind of gridlock we have been voting for, even if we complain about it when we get it.

Along these lines, the American system of “checks and balances” intentionally defuses political power at both the “horizontal” and “vertical” axes—at the national governmental level through separation of powers and in the relationship between that national government and the states through a system of “federalism” wherein states retain considerable capacity to block federal initiatives.

The American system was therefore intended to produce the very stalemate that our pundits decry, and at the heart of those intentions was a belief that unchecked governmental power is a threat to liberty.

The founders and the liberal tradition that they were influenced by (and did so much in turn to influence) did not disparage government per se. To the contrary, they saw it as indispensable for pulling us out of the bloody, insecure “state of nature” and protecting rights and property through the provision of security and order.

But they also recognized that there can be no worthy form of republican government that doesn’t feature firm constraints upon governmental power. In many respects, creating a system where it is possible to divide such power between a legislature controlled by one party and an executive branch controlled by the other reflects this philosophy, as does the apparent unwillingness to keep either branch for very long in either party’s hands (the only occasion in the last 70 years when the same party kept the White House for three consecutive terms was in 1988, with the Reagan-Bush handoff).

Contemporary conservatives and libertarians, as the inheritors of the classical liberal tradition and its skepticism of centralized power, should therefore have few reasons to complain when one branch of the federal government blocks another or a state government blocks the federal government, even if it is a Democratic House of Representatives or a Democratic governor doing the blocking.

Within such obstructionism is found the genius of the American system and its capacity for preventing government from doing things that aren’t truly necessary and/or can’t command sufficient public support.

The late Charles Krauthammer presciently argued that the “guardrails” of the American constitutional order were especially designed to contain the likes of Donald Trump.

Indeed, in contrast to the often unitary parliamentary arrangements found in other democracies, particularly European, the American system is the most effective yet invented for dispersing power in order to protect the people’s liberties and allow them to go about their daily lives without excessive governmental interference. There is, generally beneficially, perhaps no political order where the executive has less room to act without the support of other elected officials and indirectly elected judges.

Asalutary lesson might also be about to be learned from all this by a political left which has become increasingly critical of our Constitutional order because of the manner in which it obstructs efficient governmental action—that the same mechanisms that allowed a Republican Congress and Republican governors to obstruct a Democratic president can now be effectively used in turn by a Democratic House and Democratic governors (more numerous after Nov. 6) to block a Republican one.

In 2016, a sufficient number of voters decided that it was imperative to keep Hillary Clinton out of the Oval Office. In 2018, a sufficient number decided it was important to prevent Trump from doing too much damage while in it.

It was an entirely reasonable response to the terrible electoral choice presented two years ago, and one made possible by the foresight of some remarkable men at Philadelphia back in 1787.