Change v. Rigidity

The day after election, Arkansas' Senator J. William Fulbright stirred up a hornet's nest. In Philadelphia, venerable birthplace of the Constitution, Democrat Fulbright made a bold suggestion. The Republicans had captured Congress; why not let them take over completely? Said he:

"President Truman should appoint a Republican Secretary of State and resign from office. . . . The Constitution provides for the Secretary of State to succeed the President when there is no Vice President. . . . It will place the responsibility of running the Government on one party and prevent a stalemate."

Democrats and Republicans leaped to protest in unison. An anonymous Administration spokesman called the idea "utterly fantastic" (it would lose the Democrats the last remnants of federal patronage). Buzzed Oregon's G.O.P. Senator Wayne Morse: "Blind partisanship" (it would give a Democrat the power to appoint a Republican President).

Editorial writers and columnists, thumbing their history books, clucked dubiously. In a front-page open letter, however, the New Dealing Chicago Sun urged the President to take "this patriotic and courageous step." The Republican New York Sun replied by quoting Indiana's Republican Representative Halleck: this is not our way of doing things.

Precedent bore out Kalleck's observation. On 27 previous occasions U.S. Presidents had had to contend with at least one branch of Congress controlled by a hostile party. The father of Senator Robert Taft had spent two particularly anguished years of deadlock. A sick and beaten Woodrow Wilson had watched an antagonistic Republican Senate reject his League. Hapless Herbert Hoover had scolded and quarreled while a Democratic House hamstrung him throughout the desperate end of his divided Administration.

Tyranny v. Paralysis. The framers of the Constitution had not foreseen such deadlocks. Most of them were unaware of the role political parties would play in the system they created. James Madison expressed the climate of 1787 with the statement that "the accumulation of all powers in the same hands . . . [is] the very definition of tyranny." The Constitutional fathers deliberately set up the Federal Government as a system of checks and balances. But they never expected party differences to result in a federal stalemate.

The image of the then powerful British monarchy was vivid in the minds of the Founding Fathers; they were determined not to let the presidency become any such tyranny. The process by which the British Prime Minister and his Cabinet share responsibility with Parliament, and keep their jobs only by controlling a parliamentary majority, did not evolve until after the U.S. Constitution was written. In 1940, under this system, discredited Neville Chamberlain gave way to Winston Churchill without the necessity of an election. In the midst of the delicate Potsdam Conference last year, Labor Party leaders translated a victory at the polls into a quick and orderly assumption of the complete powers of government.

Rhodes Scholar Fulbright was well steeped in such comparisons. Last week he promised to introduce a Constitutional amendment providing for the simultaneous election of the President and both branches of Congress, for equal terms. The chances to overturn 159 years of Constitutional tradition were scarcely favorable. But the dilemma in Washington had excited new speculation about the Constitution and its rigidities.

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