US Gov Assessment - Assignment Example

Question The question of whether or not the President of the United s is too powerful has been the of much debate. This question isoften debated within the context of comparing the American President with the British Prime Minister. While the British system has evolved to give a Prime Minister enjoying the support of parliament almost absolute power, the early Americans sought to devise a system that would never enable for one office to overpower another. According to Locke (2002,63) “absolute arbitrary power, or governing without settled standing laws, can neither of them consist with the ends of society and government, which men would not quit the freedom of the state of nature for, and tie themselves up under, were it not to preserve their lives, liberties and fortunes; and by stated rules of right and property to secure their peace and quiet.” Thomas Paine (1997, 6), another figure whose influence on early American thinkers cannot be understated, warned in his pamphlet Common Sense “the king is not to be trusted without being looked after, or in other words, a thirst for absolute power is the natural disease of the monarchy.” With anti-monarchist influences like Locke and Paine, it’s not wonders that the architects of the American constitution constructed a political system that significantly limited the powers of the executive branch and instituted a number of difficult-to-navigate checks and balances. Much debate surrounded the exact role of the President during the early constitutional debates that followed the American Revolution. However, it was universally agreed upon that a strong separation of powers was needed. Much of the debate surrounded exactly how powerful, or how weak, the executive branch, headed by the President, was to be. The founders of the American constitution agreed (MacDonald, 1994, 126) “that safety and ordered liberty cannot exist without competent government and that government without an executive authority is no government at all.” Ultimately, the founders agreed on a concept that would create a natural and permanent tension between the President, the chief executive, and the members of Congress who were responsible for the legislation of the nation’s laws. They did this be ensuring that the new constitution contained (Thach, 1969, 70)“no constitutional legal barrier which Congress could not at pleasure cross.” This intuitional strength that the founders granted Congress would significantly diminish the powers of the American executive, especially when compared to British counterparts. When we examine recent current American political landscape we can imagine how events would be different in Britain. President Obama recently spent almost a year advocating that congress pass a piece of healthcare reform legislation that would see every American universally protected. This would not be a surprising development if the Congress was controlled by members of the Republican Party. However, in many cases, Obama is seeing his legislation being hung up by members of his own political party. There are many Democrats who are siding Republicans in this highly controversial issue. Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas told the Agence France-Presse “"Im promising my colleagues that Im prepared to vote against moving to the next stage of consideration as long as a government-run public option is included.” This turn of events serves as a perfect illustration of the lack of party disciple in the United States. Considering the fact that the American people have awarded the Democratic Party an overwhelming mandate in the legislative and the executive branch, it would be easy for one to assume on the surface that Obama could have made his dream of universal healthcare a reality in a more timely fashion. In recent times, (Trueman, 2002) “the budget and programmes of the Federal government have increased in size and number. the relation of the Federal to the State governments has changed and become far more complex fiscally, organisationally and politically. the nature of the presidency has altered as its prominence has increased and its centrality in the political life of a nation has become permanent”. The relationship between the President, the Executive and Congress has become the most important in American politics. For this reason, A president has to maintain a positive and productive relationship with both to ensure that his policy priorities proceed without interference. If a President cannot maintain that relationship, he or she will be ineffectual and type cast as a “lame duck”. Question 2. We develop a model of interest group influence in the presence of repeated electoral competition. In each period of the game, an interest group attempts to “buy” an incumbents policy choice, and a voter chooses whether to replace the incumbent with an unknown challenger. The voter (Snyder, 2007, 14) “faces a tension between retaining good politician types and rewarding past performance.” The model predicts that “above average” incumbents face little discipline, but others are disciplined increasingly – and re-elected at a higher rate – as the interest group becomes more extreme. Extensions of the model consider term limits, long-lived groups, and multiple groups. `There is a conception among the general population, particularly in the West, that elected politics is limited to those who have access to large amounts of economic capital. Using the American example, Bradford Plumer, in his recent paper (Plumer, 2006)“How the Rich Control Politics” notes that statistics show “that elected officials tend to hail from the upper classes.” He goes on to add that “At least 35 percent of members of Congress were millionaires in 2005, according to the Center for Responsive Politics--compared with 1 percent for the population at large--and senators had a median net worth of $1.1 million”. However, this should come as no surprise due to the lack of “publicly financed elections, it often takes a good deal of personal wealth and connections to run for office. The average Senate campaign in 2006 cost about $5.8 million.” Plumer says the problem of the increasingly important role played by economical capital in the American political system is not limited to the ability to hold office though. He observes that (Plumer, 2006)“ people in the $75,000 bracket are much more likely than those in the $15,000 bracket to join a political advocacy group like the National Rifle Association or the NAACP (73 percent versus 29 percent) and much more likely to make campaign contributions (56 percent versus 6 percent)”. Until significant changes are made, Bourdieu’s conception of economic capital will continue to play a major role in elected politics in the United States and, to varying degrees, other nations across the world. Because of the costly amount of political campaigns, interest groups are able to exploit this fact and essentially “buy candidates”. Both parties in America generally depend on wealthy donors and organizations - traditionally the Democrats depended on donations from organized labor while the Republicans relied on business donations. Since 1984, however, the Democrats business donations have surpassed those from labor organizations. This dependency on donors is controversial, and has led to laws limiting spending on political campaigns being enacted .Opponents of campaign finance laws cite the First Amendments guarantee of free speech, and challenge campaign finance laws because they attempt to circumvent the peoples constitutionally guaranteed rights. However, this argument has largely been dismissed. The fear repeatedly heard, of course, is that money "corrupts" politics. In response, (Pilon, 1999) “Congress severely restricted the amount of money that any one individual or group could give to a candidate--limits that have not been changed since they were imposed in 1974--which means that candidates since then have had either to be independently wealthy, to be constantly raising money in small sums, or to be looking for ways around the system.” Is it any wonder that no one likes this system. However, politicians have easily found loopholes around these measures. Therefore, until we have true campaign finance reform, interest groups will continue to own political parties in the United States. Read More