A Republic No More. Jay Cost
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power to the government has resulted in an enormous amount of additional complexity, and no citizen can practically keep an eye on the government to ensure that it behaves. Presidents, senators, representatives, and bureaucrats too often retain plausible deniability for their role in corrupt outcomes, undermining the power of the people to advance the public good through elections.
The third way becomes apparent when we consider the two greatest institutional alterations of the original design: the democratization of the Electoral College and the rise of political parties. These concepts are not originally in the Constitution, nor were they formally amended into it, but they are nevertheless part of the landscape now. Opening up the presidency to public voting, more than anything else, facilitated the national political parties, forging cross-state political alliances to reap the benefits the top office provides. The problem with this is that parties are formal, enduring factions, but the presidency itself was supposed to be insulated from factionalism. Democratizing the presidency, and thrusting the office into the partisan battle, inevitably changed the calculus of the occupant. He must build and maintain a coalition that almost invariably amounts to a subset of the nation at large, which means it is often in his interests to affix his gaze on something quite less than the public good. This in turn means that the president is much less able to control the localism of the Congress by the veto, especially when he is bound to its members via a political party. Thus, what should have been in theory an office that tamps down on corruption is, in practice, just as often an office that facilitates it. The more power that is granted to the executive branch, the greater capacity the president has to use that power for corrupt purposes.
Fourth, we have built new institutions within government whose role in the system is difficult to reconcile with the Constitution. For instance, the First Bank of the United States was a private corporation that nevertheless derived a great deal of support from the feds. Ditto more recent institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. How are such institutions to be understood vis-à-vis checks and balances, especially considering the Constitutional Convention’s opposition to such publicly chartered corporations? The public-private nature of these institutions can be a breeding ground for corruption, as was particularly evident during the early years of the Second Bank of the United States, and with the accounting scandals that plagued Fannie and Freddie in the early 2000s.
The modern bureaucracy may be classified similarly. Of course, there was an executive bureaucracy from the very beginning of the country, but its size and scope have increased so enormously that it becomes difficult—if not impossible—for Congress to supervise it properly. Indeed, one of the most important insights of political science literature in recent decades is that Congress is more likely to monitor the bureaucracy when the transaction costs of such an inquiry are paid for by interest groups, via information or campaign contributions. This, in turn, often induces bureaucrats to yield to the interests of the most connected pressure groups.
In sum, we have a Congress that is too parochial to wield the nationalistic powers that it has been granted. We have a public that is necessarily too ill-informed to protect the republican principle. We have a politicized presidency that often lacks the capacity to check Congress for the national interest. We have these strange extraconstitutional organizations that do not fit cleanly into the schema. What does that mean? Again, consider Wilson’s metaphor for the Constitution, a Newtonian system. Various selfish interests enter the arena, are checked by and balanced with other such forces, and the final product that emerges on the other end is supposed to be in the public interest. But these new governmental powers altered the original structure in these four ways, and thus have broken the Newtonian system. Nowadays, too much of what Washington produces is not in the public interest.
To be clear, this argument does not lead inevitably to advocacy for a night-watchman state, nor will this book call (explicitly or implicitly) for a return to the Constitution as it was understood upon ratification. Based on the premises established here, one could just as easily argue the converse position. In such a conception, the problem was that the Federalists ceded too much ground to the Anti-Federalists, and thus accepted a structure not built to operate necessary powers. The argument here cannot be situated on today’s left-right divide; it is, rather, that the powers the government now wields are poorly suited to the structures it employs to wield them, with corruption being the attending result.
The rest of this book is dedicated to demonstrating the theory developed above. To do that, it is part history and part contemporary policy analysis.
Chapter One looks at the battle between Madison and Hamilton over the First Bank of the United States, which established a tension that has existed ever since: leaders like Hamilton have sought to expand the powers of the government beyond the original scope of the charter to solve pressing problems. Yet those expansions come with a major downside in that they undermine the balance Madison thought the Constitution created.
Chapter Two examines the behavior of the Jeffersonian Republican Party once it acquired control of the government in 1800. It shows that expansions of federal power are more or less permanent, for the Jeffersonians, who opposed Hamilton in the 1790s, came to accept almost all of his innovations, and even added a few themselves. The result was rampant political corruption through much of the 1820s, culminating in the Bank War of the early 1830s, a sobering time in the nation’s history when the rule of law was sacrificed for the sake of political leverage.
Chapter Three brings the political parties into the analysis. As we shall see, they are integral in any understanding of American political corruption, for they politicized the presidency, forcing the occupant to use federal resources to maintain his electoral coalition. The first way that presidents did this was through patronage, or the provision of government jobs and contracts to their supporters. That will be the focus there.
Chapter Four will be the first to demonstrate a central theme of political corruption: when it is not being actively opposed, it tends to spread. Like cancer or wood rot, it will work its way through an entire body politic, destroying every last vestige of the republican principles that once existed. Something like this happened with the patronage regime. First developed during Andrew Jackson’s administration, it was expanded and “perfected” by the early 1870s, so that the entirety of federal politics was reducible, more or less, to the maintenance of massive, statewide patronage machines.
Chapter Five will continue this theme about how corruption spreads by looking at the continued federal efforts to promote the national economy. As Chapters One and Two will have shown, this was an early breeding ground for corruption in the nineteenth century, and by the end of that century the corruption had gone from rudimentary to exceedingly complicated and virtually insuperable. After federal patronage dried up with the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883, politicians—particularly the leaders of the Republican Party and its bosses in machine-dominated states—turned to big business for funds. In so doing, they perverted the bold nationalism of Hamilton’s original agenda into a corrupt logroll that benefited midwestern manufacturers and northeastern financiers at the expense of poor farmers, particularly in the South and West.
Chapter Six will introduce the progressive movement to the story. The progressives successfully curtailed many of the corrupt practices of the late nineteenth century, but they failed to end them once and for all. Indeed, they made matters worse. While a handful of progressives like Wilson identified the root cause of corruption as having to do with the incapacity of the government to exercise its powers responsibly, they failed to fix this problem. Moreover, the progressives were responsible for popularizing the second nationalistic power mentioned above, that of regulating the economy for noneconomic goals. Absent structural reforms to the government, this would become another potential source for corruption.
Chapter Seven will look at the New Deal period. A massive expansion in government, this period also (and not coincidentally) produced a startling reinvigoration of corruption, along all three dimensions we will have discussed by that point. First, efforts to revive the domestic economy were captured by congressional logrolls that distributed money based on political considerations. Second, federal jobs were used to create state and even national political machines, as early progress on civil service reform was basically wiped away. Third, the new