Necessary Insignificance and Pliancy

Gentle Readers, you have probably seen this quoted elsewhere this week, but I would be remiss in my blogduties if I did not pass along Federalist 76, on The Appointing Power of the Executive. “It has been observed,” says Publius, voiced by Alexander Hamilton in 1788, “that ‘the true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.’” He examines, then the ways to appoint people to positions of power and authority. He dismisses the idea that appointments ought to come from groups or committees, as personal attachment and personal animosity will be multiplied in such groups, along with party feeling and compromise, which will take precedence over “the advancement of the public service”. On the other hand, placing appointment power in the hands of the President has risks of its own. By reducing the President’s power to nomination, rather than appointment, we maintain the benefits of sole responsibility, while exposing the exercise of that responsibility to political scrutiny.

To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity. In addition to this, it would be an efficacious source of stability in the administration.
It will readily be comprehended, that a man who had himself the sole disposition of offices, would be governed much more by his private inclinations and interests, than when he was bound to submit the propriety of his choice to the discussion and determination of a different and independent body, and that body an entire branch of the legislature. The possibility of rejection would be a strong motive to care in proposing. The danger to his own reputation, and, in the case of an elective magistrate, to his political existence, from betraying a spirit of favoritism, or an unbecoming pursuit of popularity, to the observation of a body whose opinion would have great weight in forming that of the public, could not fail to operate as a barrier to the one and to the other. He would be both ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same State to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.

What Mr. Hamilton fails to foresee is the effect of broadcast media in raising the pulpit of the presidency higher than that of the local representative. The entire Federalist argument, in fact, explicitly states that the most basic and fundamental check on the Federal government will be that the voter will know his local representative better than any federal one, that he will trust his local representative (or elect someone else), that he will have a familiarity with his local representative that he will never have with any federal official. Not so. The reason the presidential pulpit is such a bully one is that everybody knows who the president is and nobody knows or cares who their assemblyman is. This is celebrity culture, and Mr. Hamilton knew nothing of it.

Yes, Our Only President should be ashamed and afraid to bring forward any candidate to be the obsequious instrument of his pleasure. To do such should be a danger to his reputation and to his political existence (alas, we have amended the scheme to guarantee his political death at the end of the term and remove such blandishments), but it will not be. Well, and the man currently riding the pulpit doesn’t appear to care much about his reputation, at least not in the sense Mr. Hamilton means, but he is aware that there would only be “be great probability of having the place supplied by a man of abilities, at least respectable.” I think we’ve done pretty well over forty-odd presidents, when you think about it. Almost all have either been men of abilities or respectable. Almost.

Yet Mr. Hamilton does not expect almost to cut the constitutional mustard. The constitution must prepare for “the most corrupt periods of the most corrupt governments”, for which Mr. Hamilton trusts “a large proportion of the body [of the Senate], which consists of independent and public-spirited men, who have an influential weight in the councils of the nation.” We shall see.

Though it might therefore be allowable to suppose that the Executive might occasionally influence some individuals in the Senate, yet the supposition, that he could in general purchase the integrity of the whole body, would be forced and improbable. A man disposed to view human nature as it is, without either flattering its virtues or exaggerating its vices, will see sufficient ground of confidence in the probity of the Senate, to rest satisfied, not only that it will be impracticable to the Executive to corrupt or seduce a majority of its members, but that the necessity of its co-operation, in the business of appointments, will be a considerable and salutary restraint upon the conduct of that magistrate.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.