The 2024 elections installed a regime of one-party rule in Washington. On January 20, the presidency, Senate and House of Representatives will all be controlled by Republicans, many of whom are committed foot soldiers in newly elected President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. Add to that the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority, which has already shown itself willing to turn the Constitution on its head to serve the interests of the newly elected president.
There is one positive aspect to total Republican rule: one-party rule can be an advantage in terms of democratic accountability.
Proponents of so-called “responsible party government,” dating back to President Woodrow Wilson, define democracy as “the people’s control of government through responsible rulers.” For them, only the cohesion, discipline and solidarity of political parties can hold rulers to account.” However, this presupposes that members of political parties respect the norms of constitutional government and demonstrate greater loyalty to the prerogatives of the branches of government in which they serve than their political party. The post-election period has already produced worrying signals that this will not be the case for the Republican majority in Congress and on the Supreme Court under Trump.
The idea of industry loyalty was of paramount importance to the people who wrote the Constitution. Perhaps the best expression of their position can be found in Federalist 51. In it, James Madison argued that the separation of powers between the president, Congress, and the Supreme Court would be essential to protecting the freedom of Americans. But he warned that the plan would only work if each branch of government had what Madison called a “will of its own.” As Madison put it, “The great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department consists in giving to those who govern each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist the encroachments of the others. The provision for defense in this, as in all other cases, must be proportionate to the danger of attack.”
“Ambition,” he said, “must work against ambition. The man’s interest must be tied to the constitutional rights of the place.”
Although Madison did not envision the rise of political parties of the kind that dominate the political landscape today, he hoped that members of Congress would defend the prerogatives of their branch, such as their role in providing advice and consent in the appointment of executive and judicial officers. , their responsibilities for overseeing executive actions, the power of the purse strings, etc., against the president.
As Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution notes, “The checks and balances the Framers introduced… depended on the separation of the three branches of government, each of which they believed would zealously guard its own power and prerogatives. have not put in place safeguards against the possibility of solidarity between national parties crossing state borders, because they could not imagine that such a thing was possible.”
Crucially for the current moment, they also did not “foresee that members of Congress and perhaps members of the judiciary would refuse to curb the power of a president of their own party.”
Kagan points to Trump’s two impeachments and suggests that “party loyalty has replaced industry loyalty, and never more so than in the Trump era.” Republican “members of Congress are willing to defend or ignore the president’s actions simply because he is their party leader.” This, Kagan says, makes impeachment and conviction virtually a dead letter.
There are, of course, other checks on the tendency of one-party government to undermine the system of separation of powers and checks and balances. One of the most important is the impact of intra-party conflict within the majority party. Law professor Gregory Elinson notes that “intraparty conflict can immunize our constitutional system from the pathologies that arise when partisan political warfare is added to the Madisonian model of separate institutions sharing power… Today, Americans know, as was the case at the time of its founding, no great love for intra-party conflict or party fractionalism.”
Elinson suggests that Americans “have failed to understand that the relative porosity of our parties—the very characteristic that drives internal party conflict—has helped protect our republic….”
But in recent years, this type of intraparty conflict has diminished significantly, at least as evidenced by the way members of Congress vote on legislation. In 2022, the Pew Research Center found that “both parties have become more ideologically cohesive. There are now only about two dozen moderate Democrats and Republicans left on Capitol Hill, down from more than 160 in 1971-72. Both parties have moved further from the ideological center since the early 1970s. Democrats have become slightly more liberal on average, while Republicans have become much more conservative on average.”
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So it’s not surprising that, as David Davenport says, “voting along the party line has become the new norm. As recently as the early 1970s, the party unity vote was around 60%, but today it is closer to 90% in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.” That continued during Trump’s first term, when every Republican but one voted to support the president’s position on legislation between 80 and 100 percent of the time.
From 2017 to 2021, when Democrats controlled at least one chamber of Congress, Trump and members of his administration regularly defied congressional subpoenas. As Trump said in 2019, “We fight all subpoenas.”
While in the White House, Trump attempted to block multiple congressional investigations, and Republicans in the House of Representatives and the Senate agreed without protest. Madison would have been upset if they had failed to demonstrate industry loyalty.
It appears that Republicans in Congress will fare no better in the face of a second Trump administration. The clearest example of Trump’s demand that Republicans in Congress toe the line and their willingness to do so came when the President-elect posted the following on Truth Social: “Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate, must agree to Recess appointments (in the Senate!), without these we cannot get people confirmed in a timely manner…Sometimes the votes can take two years or more. This is what they did four years ago, and we can’t let it happen again. We need positions filled IMMEDIATELY!”
The response from three senators seeking the position of Senate majority leader would have been another serious disappointment for Madison. One of them, Senator Rick Scott of Florida, quickly endorsed Trump’s demand that the Senate relinquish one of its most important prerogatives: “100% agreement. I will do everything I can to get your nominations through as quickly as possible.” The other two, Texas Sen. John Cornyn and the eventual winner, John Thune of South Dakota, also agreed that Trump should have that power and use it if he wants.
The question of whether one-party rule can be reconciled with the Founders’ vision of constitutional government will be tested again if the President-elect successfully pressures Congress to impose a recession so that he can his cabinet can appoint people about whom even many Republican senators have serious feelings. reservations. And what oversight will the House or Senate exercise as Trump’s second term progresses? How will Republican majorities in Congress respond to cases of corruption if and as they arise in government?
The first signs are not good.
Ultimately, one-party government is fine, as long as the dominant party does what Madison expected. They must carefully guard and exercise what he called “the constitutional rights” of the institutions where their members serve, even if it means defying the wishes of a president of their party.
