Kind of completely disagree. There was a podcast recently with admin people where they kept saying “expertise.” The rhetoric around the framed alternative is super bound up in a model of expertise authority that was dying before I was born. RoL not enough. Need new cement
This is tough--there's evidence that people are moved by perceived expertise more than presidential accountability (see @briandfeinstein.bsky.social's work)--but I agree that it seems like there's only going to be deepening skepticism of conventional expertise in the future. A thin reed to build on.
I'm thinking more broadly about SOP as an appealing message. Most people think Congress and the courts should restrain the President, and that the Constitution has meaning independent of the President's views. I agree on 'expertise,' but I think there is a broader lens to take with counterframing.
I really hope that the upshot of the current crisis is not that we double down on Madisonian checks and balances pablum. The right lesson is that the way you restrain rogue chief executives is by empowering the legislature.
I don't know. Legislatures can also be quite abusive (see, e.g., the French Revolution, the McCarthy era). I do think you need buy-in to broader principles of rule of law, rather than just shifting power between institutions.
No institutional design can substitute for virtue. But the dangers of legislatures pale in comparison.
I think the first part of this is critical. Whatever institutional arrangement you have, it's only going to be as good as the inputs into the system. You need a critical mass of informed, virtuous, public minded people. You rely on Madisonian checking when you lack that, which we do now.
I do think that institutional structures can affect the tenor of public deliberation. Plebiscitary politics driven by charismatic leaders is less likely to be deliberative than the legislative process. There's a reason we have multimember legislatures.
I also think that Madisonian rhetoric and institutions are fundamentally favorable to the President. We should simply say the President has to do what Congress instructs.
Oh, for sure, but that's the same reason I think it was not nuts for people to support a presidency characterized by institutional devolution and degrees of agency independence. That institutional setup was as good if not better than legislative process for producing deliberation and contestation.
Agreed. i just think we need to see empowering Congress as a necessary but not sufficient step towards restoring rule of law values.
The dangers of legislatures in general has to be separated from the dangers of *Congress,* which has limited capacity for tyranny and (imho) has easily out performed the other branches on states craft and rights protection. See, eg, Bowie & Renan.
Gotta be real that there’s not a realistic prospect of a tyrannical Congress in my lifetime or my son’s. Presidentialism and juristocracy are the clear and present dangers.
I don't disagree that these are the more imminent dangers by far. But it's been a long time since we've had a truly powerful Congress, and I think it's hard to say how that would shake out today with any degree of confidence.
I think we'd want ways for Congress to form affirmative value commitments, beyond just displacing the President as a site of political power. i think this is consistent with your own writing on Congress!
I prefer for all public officials to do good things. The institutional question is whether empowering the President or Congress is more likely to lead to good things, and I think the answer is clearly Congress.
Maybe! I suppose I'm just more cautious about how useful institutional design is on its own. There was a long period in the 20th century when liberals felt the same way about courts. Politics can change institutions quickly and in unpredictable ways.
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Seconded. Really think appeals to the old gods are not going to get you through this one.
*expertise-based authority
Administrative law is one way law constrains the president, but its not the only one. And I think a lot of ad law's legitmiacy comes from its subordination to broader legal values. I agree we've lost that framing in ad law specifically, but the general idea of checks and balances is still v popular.