The newly redecorated Oval Office is a sight to behold. Donald Trump has encrusted all pieces of furniture with gold and covered every shelf and mantlepiece with trophies, cups and various other triumphant trinkets. Even the flags that now cover every curtain remind you of just how many different branches the US military has – and most importantly, who the Commander-in-Chief is.
Everything speaks of grandiosity and achievements. Yet something’s missing. He should put up a sign that reads ‘the buck stops here’.
Buck-passing is not just a Trumpian phenomenon, it is a feature of any advanced liberal democracy that has to contend with vast bureaucracies and competing social and economic interests. The worrying thing is that the rate at which politicians shirk responsibility has increased, and is quickly becoming the norm. Trump is simply the latest and most dazzling example.
In the US, Congress is morphing from the first branch of government into a rubber-stamping chamber. And often, not even that; executive orders in the current Trump administration already number 151, nearing the amount Biden signed in four years. This might look like decisive action, but many of these executive orders look to be plainly unconstitutional and, once they slowly make their way up to the Supreme Court, the time will be ripe to pass the blame onto the Justices of the court for striking them down.
But the original sin always rests with the legislatures. They have concluded that settling controversial policy issues in law is too hard and equally dangerous for their chances of re-election. Therefore, let the executive make law. Or, even better, let the courts decide. This is how we get both Roe v Wade and its recent reversal. And how we got the Chevron Deference and its overturning too.
If key political questions are not legislated on by elected representatives, everything turns into a legal question. At some point, someone has to settle the matter. If representatives won’t out of fear of alienating many of their constituents or their party, they can always conveniently claim victory (if the courts rule their way) or stir outrage if they rule the other way (then the judiciary can be made into the perfect scapegoat). This pattern only leads – to the muffled grunts of small-state conservatives everywhere – to the greater centralisation of power, greater executive overreach and ever more burdensome bits of secondary legislation and regulations to plug the yawning gaps left by Congress.
In Britain, too, we are not completely immune from our MPs exercising their muscles by buck-passing. Contrary to the US, Britain’s parliamentary sovereignty and unwritten constitution mean that the courts have much less leeway to create law through ruling – though human rights jurisprudence is increasingly encroaching on what was once parliamentary territory. We also still have growing problems with quangos and regulatory bodies writing huge numbers of rules. More perniciously, the use of so-called ‘Henry VIII clauses’ keeps growing too, short-circuiting Parliamentary scrutiny of legislative changes. ,.
If populism, both of the Right and of the Left, were a parasitical disease, it would feed and bulge on buck-passing. When lawmakers stop taking responsibility and being accountable, what’s left is a hazy space for shady enemies of the people to be conjured up in the lead up to elections. Take your pick of ‘metropolitan elites’, ‘global financial overlords’ or ‘radical judges’ – the result is always the same.
That is why voters everywhere should pay close attention to what happens (or doesn’t happen) in their legislatures. Starting with the US, where this problem is most acute, voters should be reminded that it’s the painstaking work of debate, compromise, bill writing and re-writing that is fundamental to our democracies. It’s the work that elected representatives should take responsibility for: of arguing over minutiae and proposing new bills.
That’s where the buck should stop.
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