Legislative Supremacy: Myth or Reality?

• Author: James Oakes
• Position: Professor of History, and Chair of the History Department at the CUNY Graduate Center
• Pages: 21-24

James Oakes - Graduate School Humanities Professor, Professor of History, and Chair of the History Department at the CUNY Graduate Center, and author of The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders and Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Oid South, both published in hardcover by Knopf and in paperback by W. W. Norton.

Page 21

Jack Rakove is somewhat less inclined than I am to look to the history of political thought or to political theory for guidance on the issues of democracy that are under discussion today. Nevertheless, the principie of which he speaks-the supremacy of the legislative branch of the government-was theorized as early as the late I600s by John Locke. Legislative supremacy, or at least the popular myth of legislative supremacy, was firmly established in English political culture in the wake of the Glorious Revolution of 1689. Since American colonists were Englishmen, they participated in that mythology. It became a staple of eighteenth-century "liberalism," the single most important body of political thought influencing the American Revolution. The principie of legislative supremacy was iterated and reiterated in the most significant political treatises of the eighteenth century in America, particularly those of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, the socalled "Whig opposition" ideologists. Similarly, the socalled "rise of the legislatures" in colonial America, especially in the lower houses of the colonial assemblies, accustomed eighteenth-century Americans to the principie that the heart and soul of the government rested in the legislative branch.

Yes, Americans entered and carne out of the Revolution in the 1780s committed to the principie that legislatures are supreme. And, I agree with Rakove to the extent that the present threats to our civil liberties and the presumptuous prerogatives claimed by a rapidly reimperializing presidency are grounded in the problem of a legislative branch that is supine in the face of executive overreaching. Congress should do more to restrain President George W. Bush, or at least his zealous Attorney General. But I am not sure that that is the problem.

I associate an imperial presidency with a chief executive who overrides or evades congressional will, even in cases that to us seem banal. Andrew Jackson's famous veto of Congress's decision to charter the Sec-Page 22ond Bank of the United States established the precedent that a policy disagreement could justify a veto...