How Much Power?

Fearful of popular misrule yet mistrustful of an autocratic executive, the framers of the Constitution did their best to preclude either extreme. They 1) devised the Electoral College so that wiser heads than the people's would choose the President, and 2) limited Representatives to two-year terms so that the House would be responsive and responsible to the will of the voter. If neither excess is inconceivable today, neither safeguard is wholly necessary or suitable to contemporary America. Last week, as he promised in his State of the Union address, Lyndon Johnson asked Congress to amend the Constitution so as to abolish the Electoral College and give Representatives four-year terms.

The Electoral College system showed serious flaws almost from the beginning. With the rise of political parties in the 1790s, it became an undemocratic anachronism by which three candidates who had run second in the popular election actually became President.* While Congress has considered dozens of proposals for reform, the system has remained basically intact since the Twelfth Amendment, ratified in 1804, prescribed separate electoral votes for President and Vice President.

Fair Formula. In phrases that echoed those of Andrew Jackson, who demanded reform of the presidential-election process in eight successive messages to Congress, Johnson urged elimination of "several major defects"--notably the electors' theoretical right to disregard the winning candidate's popular majority. They can either elect someone who is not even a candidate or, in a close election, fail to give any nominee a majority and so put the election up to the House of Representatives. The present system provides that if the choice goes to the House, each state delegation has a single vote. Johnson's proposal would change this provision to include the Senate and to give each member of Congress one vote. In case of the death of the President-elect, the Vice President-elect would be inaugurated in his place.

Johnson's formula would not alter the traditional unit-rule system by which a candidate gets all of a state's electoral vote regardless of how small his popular plurality. Thus a nominee could still conceivably get a majority of the nationwide popular vote and yet lose the election. However, since it would make modest improvements without involving drastic change, there is a fair chance that this amendment will win the two-thirds majorities in Congress necessary to send it to the states for ratification.

Senate Challenge. By contrast, the President's recommendation for doubling the terms of Representatives would constitute a more radical departure, and thus has slimmer prospects of passage. For obvious reasons, it commands considerable support in the House, especially among junior members and those from swing districts, who object that under the present system a member has barely taken his seat before he must begin thinking of reelection. As congressional sessions grow longer, bills more numerous, issues more complex, Representatives argue that they are needlessly distracted from their proper business of lawmaking.

Senators, understandably, have less interest in the change. For one thing, it would help build up challengers for their own seats (although the proposal as now drafted would force a Representative to resign at least a month before Election Day if he decided to run for the Senate). Some House members who face little challenge in their districts also are skeptical. Brooklyn Democrat Emanuel Celler, a 22-term Congressman and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, reasons: "The House represents the people, and they should have the right to register their will more often than every four years."

Stronger Coattails. The most controversial feature of the Johnson amendment is its proposal to elect the entire

House in presidential-election years. Thus after 1972, when it would take effect--and when Johnson himself will no longer be a candidate--the presidential party could not suffer its traditional off-year losses in the House. By strengthening the presidential coattails, the amendment, in Celler's words, would make the House "subservient to the presidential will." Since the President has no veto power over constitutional amendments, Congress can submit to the states any draft it chooses. An alternative to the Johnson proposal would provide for staggered elections, with half the House members running every two years. But even this would increase the President's influence on the House by assuring four-year terms for those of his party carried in with him. As it is, argues Historian James MacGregor Burns, economic and technological change have made the presidency a "super-office," with unprecedented powers. In Presidential Government: The Crucible of Leadership, published last week, Burns notes that the President's executive staff has grown to more than 1,500, while the White House is "a round-the-clock, round-the-year campaign headquarters." The evergrowing federal budget gives the Administration more and more power over industry and the economy. As federal spending programs grow and diversify, Burns points out, the President's leverage on local communities will increase correspondingly. *

"Consensus v. Challenge." Neither a political conservative nor a dogmatic states-righter, Burns, a history professor at Williams College and sometime adviser to John Kennedy, sees much that is good and necessary in what has happened. Yet he fears its future implications, when what he calls the "corruption of consensus" may ultimately cause the Government to become "flabby and complacent and lose the cutting edge of energy, initiative and innovation." He predicts that "the passion will have disappeared, and increasingly the compulsion of purpose will be dissipated."

The extent of the Goldwater defeat gave Johnson a massive mandate that was denied both Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy, who enjoyed virtually the same statutory and economic powers available to Johnson but had considerable trouble with Congress (as underscored by Burns's last book, Deadlock of Democracy). Nonetheless, as Congress considers Lyndon Johnson's constitutional amendments, Burns concludes with a timely warning. "A great society," he says, "needs not consensus but creative leadership and creative opposition. It needs the sting of challenge in a society rich in diversity and in a politics rich in dissent."

*John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, and Benjamin Harrison in 1888. *A contrary view is advanced in the January FORTUNE, in which Editor Max Ways argues that Johnson's "creative federalism" is a dynamic force that enhances rather than diminishes the powers of cities and states by giving them the responsibility as well as the resources for meeting their problems.

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