Replace heckling with real questions
President Biden’s State of the Union address touted his administration’s economic record and bipartisan legislative achievements. Not to be outdone, Republicans including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz repeatedly heckled Biden. They disagreed in the most disagreeable way.
Shouting at the president is a failure of decorum and civility, but it is also a wasted opportunity. Congress does have legitimate questions for the president and there is no good reason that he shouldn’t be required to answer them, though maybe not during the State of the Union address. They do that across the pond in the U.K. It’s loud. It’s messy. It’s sometimes even rude and irreverent. And it’s something we need more of here in America.
One of the marquee examples of British politicians’ capacity for quips, insults, and hard-hitting debate that we’re probably most familiar with is the House of Commons’ weekly session known as Prime Minister’s Questions, or PMQs. Every Wednesday at noon members of Parliament (MPs) can directly grill the prime minister if they’re from an opposition party or — usually — ask them softball questions if they’re from the ruling party.
They’re as entertaining as they are revealing. Prime ministers put a lot of preparation into their remarks so they’re ready with zingers for the opposition when they step up to the despatch box. They have to be able to parry the opposition’s attacks or risk losing the rhetorical fencing match that PMQs represent. It’s a master class in political spin. But it’s also an opportunity for MPs to pose tough questions
A prime minister can put all his energy into landing viral one-liners and evade tough questions, but it shows. When Boris Johnson faced scrutiny for violating his own government’s lockdown policies during the COVID-19 pandemic, his attempts at PMQs to downplay the scandal even drew criticism from MPs of his own party. Therein lies the beauty of PMQs. PMQs are not like a subpoena. Prime ministers aren’t allowed to actually lie to Parliament, but they don’t have to actually answer the questions posed. But their answers — or non-answers — are done in full public view. How prime ministers respond, whether they’re confident or defensive, and how intelligent their answers are give the public real-time insight into how the government is performing.
PMQs can be both preventative and curative. Wise prime ministers know that they will have to answer, personally and publicly, for their actions and the actions of their government. PMQs can also force governments to revisit bad decisions and bring festering crises to quick resolutions.
That’s one of the reasons John McCain endorsed PMQs during his 2008 presidential campaign: “The guys that are on my side stand up and tell me how great I am, but there’d be others that would have some very tough questions to ask.”
Is this all just a pipe dream? Maybe not. American-style PMQs would need buy-in from everyone involved. To avoid separation-of-powers issues, PMQs would be a voluntary accommodation between Congress and the executive branch. If House Speaker Kevin McCarthy really wants to experiment with making government more effective and more accountable, he ought to push for giving PMQs a try.
So who benefits? Of course, the opposition party would love to question the president. Presidents themselves won’t like PMQs, but their parties might. In the U.K., PMQs are most effective when the prime minister’s own party colleagues begin asking tough questions. In other words, PMQs don’t just allow the opposition to increase transparency, they allow the ruling party to enforce accountability. And while the Trump years have shown an unwillingness among many Republicans to police their own side, even that wasn’t without exception. PMQs would encourage bipartisanship by calling more attention to congressional critics of their party’s president.
At the root of all this is a very American idea: checks and balances. Electing a president every four years is the ultimate check and balance, but America is no longer a largely rural country where government moves at the speed of a quill pen. In the modern world, we need more finely-tuned and flexible methods of keeping the president and the country on the straight-and-narrow.
The Trump years exposed a lot of weakness in those checks and balances. Many of them are a product of neglect, but some are a product of the evolution of the country itself. We shouldn’t be afraid to get creative in how we seek to repair those weaknesses. Bringing PMQs to America is an excellent start.