Charles Krauthammer articulated a major hurdle that Ted Cruz will face as he runs for the presidency:
The same applies to Marco Rubio and Rand Paul. Erick Erickson calls it, “the fair and relevant question.” Allahpundit breaks down the prospective response here.
I do not think the issue of experience is dispositive. We have had very fine presidents with little political experience—Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower come to mind. We’ve had terrible presidents with lots of political experience—James Buchanan, for instance. There is no relevant job experience because the presidency is so different from everything else.
Rather, the essential question is: Can the president influence Congress to pass a conservative reform agenda that enjoys broad public support?
This query fully prices in the president’s role in our constitutional order. Article I, Section 1 reads: “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.” We must acknowledge Congress, not the president, is at the center of our regime.
Congress has made a mess of public policy. It has generated an endless tangle of inefficient, half-baked, contradictory rules that secure client-patron relationships between politicians and all manner of interest groups. That goes for tax policy, farm policy, infrastructure policy, regulatory policy, everything.
From top to bottom: Congress is an irresponsible steward of the public trust. Almost all of our problems trace back to the dysfunction of the Congress. Even Obama’s executive overreach: Congress has been handing legislative authority to the president and bureaucracy for 80 years; is it any wonder a president finally took something that wasn’t given him?
What conservatives need is a president who can induce Congress to make reforms that it would not otherwise make. This is no mean feat. After all, public policy emanating from Congress works quite well for … members of Congress! They like the status quo, thank you very much. Ideally, a good president helps members see their self-interest rightly understood, as Tocqueville would say. He gets them to do what they should be doing, anyway.
There are two ways a president does that. The first is the “inside game.” This includes paying attention to members, sharing the perquisites of the presidential office, helping them deal with a recalcitrant bureaucracy, supporting favored pieces of legislation, and offering campaign assistance. It all gets down to a president knowing what levers he can pull to get Congress to do what he wants.
The second is the “outside game.” The president applies pressure on Congress indirectly, by influencing public opinion. The thinking is that if the president rallies the people, Congress will follow along.
In general, the president’s power is limited, regardless of strategy. The appearance of executive authority often has less to do with the president’s mettle than with the political context in which he finds himself. Moreover, the ideal of a “strong president” is a Progressive Era myth that facilitates government growth. Propagated by Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, it gives the false impression that somebody is “in charge.” In truth, nobody is actually in charge of our government. Conservatives would do well to follow the Framers’ lead, and focus more energy on Congress.
That being said, we should still select a presidential nominee as if the myth were true. Presidential skill does not matter nearly as much as we assume, but it still matters. So, it makes sense to pick a skillful leader.
Is Ted Cruz such a leader? Perhaps. He is extremely skillful at the outside game, but he will have to make the case that he can work with the Congress. This is something he’s not yet proved during his short tenure in the Senate.
Already, plenty of Republican members of Congress do not like him. National Journal offered an unflattering contrast between Cruz and former senator Tom Coburn:
While the Texas firebrand nearly brought the government to a standstill over President Obama’s immigration order, his spending-averse Oklahoma colleague did plenty on his own to make lame-duck life difficult in the upper chamber.
Coburn, who is retiring at the end of this term, filibustered a must-pass defense bill, holding up its passage until late Friday—and preventing the Senate from taking up any of its other year-end legislation in the meantime. He also put holds on a pair of end-of-term bills, a terrorism risk insurance program and a measure to prevent veteran suicides, both due to spending concerns.
But while Cruz has made headlines and drawn plenty of ire from his colleagues, Coburn has avoided such above-the-fold dramatics—and he’s drawing warm praise from all over Capitol Hill as his Senate tenure draws to a close.
I share Cruz’s apparent contempt for the Senate. It is an institution in desperate need of reform, and until change comes it will remain deeply dysfunctional.
In the meantime, I applaud those “rogue” senators ruffling feathers in the upper chamber. If the Senate cannot be stopped from ruining our public finances and derailing the economy, at least it can be inconvenienced. But more than this, a populist senator can be a point of contact between the grassroots and the Congress. The people can follow his lead to “melt the phone lines,” as they say. And maybe that can move the policy needle just a little bit.
But the task of a president is quite different. Return to Article I, Section 1: there is no getting around the Congress. The task of a reformist president is to persuade Congress to do what it doesn’t want to do — through blandishments, patronage, threats, whatever it takes. The president must be subtle and crafty about it. He must get these people to work with him, even if he thinks they are the real problem.
Can Cruz do this? Certainly, some of his congressional colleagues are right now skeptical. But he’d be wise to prove to the American voters that, if elected president, he could work with that co-equal branch of government.
Jay Cost is a staff writer for the Weekly Standard. His new book, A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption, is now available.
