Behind the Mirrors Part 11

Already, in the habit of blaming every failure and disappointment upon Congress, we see signs of the growth of the happy belief that the King can do no wrong. When the King does nothing he can do no wrong.

There is no reason why we should not repeat the experiences of peoples who have gone further upon the road of social differentiation than we have and develop like them parliamentary government. By this I do not mean to echo the nonsense that has been written about having the Cabinet officers sit in Congress.

What is more likely to come is a new shift in the balance, a new manifestation of our genius for the practical, which no written const.i.tution can restrain, which will place the initiative in the legislative branch, whereas I have said, under Mr. Harding it is already pa.s.sing, and which will make Congress rather than the President the dominant factor in our political life.

This process is already taking place.

When President Harding asked the advice of the Senate whether he should revive an old treaty with Germany suspended by the war, pointing proudly to the tenderness he was showing the partner of his political joys, he conceded an authority in the legislative branch which neither the Const.i.tution nor our traditions had placed there. He took a step toward recognizing the prospective dominance of Congress. It was one of many.

It is a long distance, as political inst.i.tutions are measured, from President Wilson's telling the Senate that it must bow to his will even in dotting the i's and crossing the t's of the Versailles Treaty, to Mr. Harding's asking the Senate what was its will regarding the old German treaty. Foreign relations are precisely the field where the executive power seems by the Const.i.tution to have been most clearly established, yet it is just here that the legislative branch has made its most remarkable advance toward a dominating position; perhaps because this topic gained a temporary importance from the war and it was naturally in the most significant area that the conflict between the two branches of the government had to break out.

When President Harding introduced the treaties and pacts resulting from the Washington Conference into the Senate, he said that he had been a Senator and knew the Senate views, and that all the agreements he was offering for ratification had been negotiated with scrupulous regard to the Senate's will. And he pleaded with the Senate not to disavow the Executive and impair its standing in the conduct of foreign relations.

No more complete avowal could be made of the dominant position which the Senate has come to occupy in the diplomatic affairs of the country.

In the field where he was supposed legally to have the initiative the President became expressly the agent of the Senate. The Senate laid out the limits of policy and the Executive scrupulously, so he said, observed those limits.

This speech of Mr. Harding's, like his consulting the Senate in advance upon the reviving of the German treaty, is one of the significant evidences of the shift of power that is taking place, away from the Executive toward the Legislative. It did not attract the attention it deserved because our minds are still full of the past when the Presidency was a great office under Wilson and Roosevelt. We read of Mr.

Harding's going to the hill to tell Congress what it must do, and we ignore the fact that he always does so when Congress sends for him, acting as their agent.

The King still makes his speech to Parliament, though the speech is written by the ministers. They are his ministers, though Parliament selects them. The power of the King is a convenient fiction. The power of the President will always remain a convenient fiction, even if it should come to have no more substance than that of the King.

In truth it has been the Senate not the Executive that has been determining our foreign policy in its broader outlines for more than two years. The Secretary of State works out the details. But the Senate says "thus far shalt thou go and no farther." And when the Secretary of State has gone farther, as in the case of the peace treaty with Germany, the Senate has amended his work. So Senator Penrose did not exaggerate, when he said apropos of Mr. Hughes's appointment, "It makes no difference who is Secretary of State, the Senate will make the foreign policy." The President has only recently declared that it has done so.

So gradual has been the extension of the Senate's prerogative that few realize how far it has gone. So low had the Senate sunk in public estimation during the war that it did not occur to President Wilson that he might not safely ignore it in making peace. He appointed no Senators to the delegation which went to Paris. He did not consult the Senate during the negotiations nor did he ever take pains to keep the Senate informed. He proceeded on the theory that he might sign treaties with perfect confidence that the Senate would accept them unquestioningly.

And so impressed was the country at the time with the power of the Presidency that Mr. Wilson's tacit a.s.sumption of dictatorial power over Congress was generally taken as a matter of course.

All this was changed under Mr. Wilson's successor. One half of Mr.

Harding's delegation to the Washington Conference was made up of Senators. At every step of the negotiation the Senate's susceptibilities were borne in mind. No commitment was entered into which would exceed the limits set by the Senate to the involvement of this country abroad.

Almost daily Mr. President consulted with Senators and explained to them what the American Commission was doing. Practically the Executive became the agent of the Senate in foreign relations and in the end he told the Senate what a good and faithful servant he had been and how scrupulously he had respected its will.

It was only superficially that Secretary Hughes was the outstanding figure of the Conference. The really outstanding figure was the Senate.

Mr. Hughes was not free. Mr. Harding was not free. The controlling factor was the Senate. The treaties had to be acceptable to the Senate, whose views were known in advance. No theory of party authority, of executive domination, would save them if they contravened the Senatorial policy disclosed in the Versailles Treaty debate and insisted upon anew to Mr. Hughes's grievous disappointment when the reservation was attached to the separate peace with Germany. When it was realized that Senate opposition to the Four Power Pact had been courted through the inadvertent guaranty of the home islands of j.a.pan, the agreement was hastily modified to meet the Senate's views. President and Secretary of State behaved at this juncture like a couple of clerks caught by their employer in a capital error.

And even Mr. Hughes's prominence was half accidental. The Senate is strong in position but weak in men. Mr. Hughes is vastly Mr. Lodge's superior in mind, in character, and in personality. Suppose the situation reversed, suppose the Senate rich in leadership, suppose it were Mr. Aldrich instead of Mr. Lodge who sat with Mr. Hughes in the Commission, then the Senate which had made the foreign policy in its broad outlines would itself have filled in the details, and a Senator instead of the Secretary of State would have been the chief figure of the American delegation.

Where did Mr. Harding's plan of settling international affairs by conferences originate? You will find it in a doc.u.ment which Senator Knox brought out to Marion, Ohio, in January, 1921. Reports had come to Washington that Mr. Harding's a.s.sociation of Nations, which was being discussed with the best minds was only Mr. Wilson's league re-cast. The leaders of the Senate met and agreed on a policy. Mr. Knox took it to the President elect. Instead of a formally organized a.s.sociation there was to be nothing more than international conferences and the appointment of international commissions as the occasion for them arose.

Mr. Harding's policy is the Senate's policy.

The Senate's victory has been complete. The United States did not ratify the Versailles Treaty. It did not enter the League of Nations. It did make a separate treaty of peace with Germany. It did not appoint a member of the Reparations Commission--the Senate's reservation to Mr.

Hughes's treaty keeping that question in the control of Congress.

Senatorial control of foreign relations seems now to be firmly established. No future president, after Mr. Wilson's experiences with the Versailles Treaty and Mr. Harding's with the Four Power Pact, will negotiate important foreign engagements without informing himself fully of the Senate's will. And the principle has been established that the Senate shall be directly represented on American delegations to world conferences.

I recall this history of the recent conflict between the Executive and the Senate over foreign relations to show how completely in this important field the theory of presidential dominance has broken down and been replaced by the practice of senatorial dominance. No amendment to the const.i.tution has taken place. The President still acts "with the advice and consent of the Senate." Only now he takes the advice first so as to be sure of the consent afterward, instead of acting first and obtaining the advice and consent afterward.

The Senate has been aided in this conflict with the Executive by the const.i.tutional requirement of a two-thirds majority for the ratification of a treaty. If a majority would suffice, a President, by invoking the claims of party, by organizing public opinion, by judiciously using patronage might put his agreements with foreign nations through. But a two-thirds vote is not to be obtained by these methods; the only practicable means is to accept the Senate's views of foreign policy and conform to it.

As soon as foreign relations became sufficiently important to fight over the conflict was inevitable and the victory of the Senate certain.

The conflict between the two branches of the Government will not stop with this victory of the Senate. It has always been present and probably always will be. The importance of the domestic problems that the war left will cause Congress to insist upon a free hand to make domestic policies. In the past Congress busied itself about little except the distribution of moneys for public buildings and river and harbor improvement. The handling of these funds the legislative branch kept out of executive control.

Now public buildings and improvements have become relatively unimportant. But the deepest economic interests of const.i.tuents are involved. Formerly taxes were small and lightly regarded. Today their incidence is the subject of a sharp dispute between cla.s.ses and industries.

Furthermore the use of government credit for certain economic ends, such as those favored by the farmers, will cause a clash between sections, groups, industries, and strata of society. Policies of large importance will have to be adopted about which there will be a vast difference of opinion. The divergent interests cannot be represented in the White House, for the Presidency embodies the compromise of all the interests.

They will have to find their voice in Congress. When they find their voice the great policies will be made. And where the great policies will be made there the power will be.

CHAPTER IX

CONGRESS AT LAST WITH SOMETHING TO DO HAS NO ONE TO DO IT

When Lazarus was raised from the dead it took him a long time to find out that he was again alive. His legs were stiff from being so long extended. His arms were cramped from being decently arranged across his breast. The circulation starting in his members produced disagreeable sensations which recalled his mortal illness and the pains of dissolution. The last thing that this discomfort suggested was life.

Even thus it is with Congress, it has been so long dead that it is hard for it to realize that it has once again come to life. It suffers from various unpleasant sensations in its members, from blocs, from lack of leadership, from indifference to party, from factionalism, from individualism, from incapacity to do business. They are all vaguely reminiscent of the pains of dissolution. On the dissolution theory they are decent and explicable, for death is always decent and explicable.

As signs of life they are scandalous, and everybody body is scandalized over them for fear that a vital Congress will be something new to reckon with.

If Congress does realize that it has waked from the dead, who will be worse scandalized than the senile persons whom the newspapers respectfully call its "leaders"? What more threatening spectacle for second childhood is there than first childhood?

Suppose Congress were again a l.u.s.ty and vigorous creature with the blood of youth in its veins, how long would Henry Cabot Lodge, aged seventy-two, remain leader of the Senate? Lodge, the irascible old man, with worn nerves, who claps his hands for the Senate pages as if they were not of the same flesh and blood with himself, and who would, if he could follow his instincts, clap his hands in the same way to summon the majority Senators, the recluse who is kept alive by old servants who understand and antic.i.p.ate every whim, to enjoy greedily the petty distinctions that have come to him late because the Senate itself was more than half dead?

And who would be worse scandalized than the ancient committee chairman, some with one foot in the grave? At one time in the first year of Mr.

Harding's administration the important chairmanships in the Senate were disposed thus: Finance, the most powerful committee, Senator Penrose, a dying man; Foreign Relations, Senator Lodge, 72; Interstate Commerce, Senator c.u.mmins, 72, and broken with illness; Judiciary, Senator Nelson, 79 and living back in the Civil War in which he served as a private; Immigration, Senator Colt, 76.

Suppose Congress should come to life and represent the real interests of the various sections, cla.s.ses, and, let us say, kinds of property and business in this country--how long would the Senate remain such a pleasant place to die in?

When these old gentlemen made their successful fight upon President Wilson they signed their own death warrants, and began putting an end to the system that made their tenure possible. Only a Congress which had long been a subject of public contempt could have fallen into and could have remained in their hands. Granted that Congress is negligible, it makes no difference who sits in it or how decrepit its leadership.

But shift power once more to the legislative, and the various conflicting interests throughout the country will grasp for the offices now in enfeebled hands. And by taking predominance in foreign relations away from the Executive and transferring it to themselves, the elderly and infirm "leaders," who have been tolerated out of half contempt, have started the avalanche of authority in their direction. It will sweep them off their unsteady feet.

Let us examine what they have done. When they opposed Mr. Wilson on the Versailles Treaty they established the power of the Senate to mark out broadly the foreign policy of the United States, a dangerous enough beginning for persons who were merely tolerated because Congress was nearly negligible and it was a matter of little difference to the public who its managers were. But when they altered Mr. Harding's treaties they also denied the authority of the Executive as the head of his party to align them in support of his program.

Party authority vested in the Executive thus impaired, it was not long before the representatives of agricultural states also denied it, and began to take their orders from the Farm Bureau Federation instead of from the White House. Then the House leaders in open defiance of the "head of the party" prepared and reported a soldiers' bonus bill which contravened the express purposes of the Executive regarding this legislation. Here we have the organization joining with the farm bloc in declaring the legislature to be its own master.

But on what do the octogenarian feet of Mr. Lodge and Mr. c.u.mmins, and Mr. Colt and Mr. Nelson, and the others, rest except upon party authority? Not upon representing any real or vital principle in the national life. Not upon any force of intelligence or personality.

They move in a region of fictions. They represent the Republican party, when there is no Republican party, no union on principles, no stable body of voters, no discipline, no clear social end to be served.

When votes for legislation must be had, Senator James Watson circulates about among the faithless pleading in the name of party loyalty--as well talk of fealty to Jupiter in the capitol of the Popes!

In extremities the President, as "head of his party," is brought on the scene,--for all the world like the practice of a certain cult which long after its founder was dead used to dress up a lay figure to resemble him and drive it about the marketplace, to rea.s.sure the faithful and confirm the influence of the priests. Mr. Harding is alive enough, but the "head of his party" is dead and a mere fiction of priests like "Jim" Watson.

Power has pa.s.sed or is pa.s.sing from the Executive and has found no one in Congress to receive it. The arrival of power causes as much consternation on the hill as the outbreak of war does among the incompetent swivel chair bureaucrats of an army in a nation that has been long at peace.

Power is pa.s.sing to Congress because Congress says who shall pay the taxes and who may use the public credit. Where there was one interest a generation ago, there are many interests today, each trying to place the burden of taxation upon others and reaching for the credit itself.