Cracking the Corruption Nut with Frank Buckley
LISTEN LIVE: Sunday, 12/31, 8–9am PACIFIC on The Answer: 860AM in SF, 1590AM Seattle and 1380AM in Sacramento
When Frank H. Buckley last joined the show, he surprised Bob with a cogent, intellectual case for the election of Donald Trump. Buckley, a Foundation Professor at George Mason University’s Scalia School of Law, advised Team Trump on campaign speeches, and geared his last book, The Way Back, towards a set of practical solutions to “restore the promise of America.” His latest book, The Republic of Virtue: How We Tried to Ban Corruption, Failed, and What we Can Do About It, completes the triptych that began with The Once and Future King, about the return of “crown governance” under the Obama administration. It should come as no surprise to listeners to this show that we have drifted from the Founders’ vision of a balance of powers — balance between states and Federal government, and among branches of Federal government. This Sunday, Bob and Frank will delve deeper into his arguments in all three books, focusing on the age-old problem of corruption — the quid-pro-quo of money for political influence that plagues every system of government. While everyone agrees that corruption is a problem, Buckley argues that platitudes about campaign finance reform and eliminating “dark money” miss the mark, and often worsen the problem by making the political system less competitive. Instead, he offers a set of solutions that limit the influence of lobbyists, reign in the executive branch’s authority, and break up corrupt judicial rings in the states. They will also discuss the recent tax bill, and why Buckley thinks its passage is reason enough to vindicate his support for Trump. Tune in to the last show of 2017, Sunday, 8–9am PT, and call in with you questions for Bob and Frank: (424) BOB-SHOW.
F.H. Buckley (@fbuckley)is a frequent media guest and has appeared on Morning Joe, CNN, Rush Limbaugh, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, Newsmax, Radio France, the CBC, NPR, and many others.
He is a Senior Editor at @TheAmericanSpectator, a columnist for the New York Post, and has written for the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, US News, National Review, the American Conservative, the New Criterion, Real Clear Politics, the National Post, the Telegraph, amongst many others.
His most recent books are The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America (Encounter Books, April 2016), The Once and Future King (Encounter Books, 2015), and The Republic of Virtue: How We Tried to Ban Corruption, Failed, and What we Can Do About It — the topic of this Sunday’s program.
The Wall Street Journal gave a glowing review to Buckley’s book — lamenting that it was too short, at just a couple hundred pages.
Barton Swaim, the reviewer, summarizes the key point of the book:
Mr. Buckley thinks we tried and failed to ban corruption at the beginning: 1787. The trouble began when the Framers, wishing to preclude the sort of corruption that had developed in Britain’s Parliament, based the new American government on the separation of powers. Instead of the crown manipulating Parliament with patronage and other favors, the Americans separated the executive from the legislature and enumerated the powers of both, thus obliging them to pull against each other and so achieve constitutional equipoise.
Yet this, Mr. Buckley laments, only created a system in which the executive becomes a law unto itself and legislators become autonomous actors primarily concerned with their own fiefdoms. In parliamentary democracies it is far easier to get rid of an incompetent or corrupt prime minister than it is to impeach a president in America, and party discipline in parliamentary systems prevents much of the brazen favor-trading that has long been routine in the U.S. Congress.”
How the Founders’ suspicion of parliament gave us “elective monarchy”
As a native of Canada, Buckley has special insight into the parliamentary system, which links the power of the prime minister to the legislature — unlike the United States with its division of powers between the presidency and Congress. Counter-intuitively, he argues, this feature of American government — which was intended to serve as a check on the executive — has bolstered the President’s powers.
He finds the seeds of our increasingly monarchical executive officeholders in a fatal flaw in the Constitution: the popular election of the president. George Mason predicted the danger in electing a single individual to serve as both the nation’s chief executive and ceremonial head of state. After refusing to sign the final draft, Mason warned, “We are not indeed constituting a British Government, but a more dangerous monarchy, an elective one.”
In his last book, The Once and Future King, Buckley noted that the Framers intended weaker separation of powers:
“James Madison came to Philadelphia with a proposal that came to be called the Virginia Plan, in which an elected House of Representatives would appoint senators, and the House and Senate together would appoint the president. [i.e., formal, but weak separation] Such a system would have more closely resembled the British Westminster system of parliamentary government, and the gridlock that characterizes Washington today would largely be absent. The party that won the White House would typically win the legislative branch, giving us the winner-take-all government of parliamentary systems. …
The increased likelihood of deadlock in a presidential system might invite dictators to step in and cure the problem by ruling extralegally, or at a minimum, by extending the scope of executive power.”
This was borne out during the last presidency, when Barack Obama threatened to use his “pen and phone,” to act in lieu of Congress’s failure to enact immigration reform.
Listen to Bob’s first show with Frank:
Executive overreach is just one facet of the corruption that has come to characterize the Presidency. Although the Founders may have done away with the old system of titles and nobility, today’s Presidency comes with many offices, appointments and goodies that can be handed out to cronies who helped them get elected.
During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the Framers struggled to limit the potential for this kind of abuse by the President. The president was supposed to be carefully selected by well-informed electors, appointed by the citizens of each state. Buckley notes that most Founders anticipated that Congress would generally end up selecting the president from a pool of candidates picked by the electoral college — none of whom would be able to get a majority of votes nationwide. Technically, Congress still picks in the event of no majority-winner in the electoral college, but advances in transportation and telecommunication have made it such that one candidate almost always collects a majority of votes in the electoral college, and so Congress’s role is nullified.
The rise of democracy and a popular election of the president first made the executive branch coequal to the legislature, and then allowed it to emerge as the modern presidency — commanding, decisive, and possessing all the authority of the only person elected by the nation at large. It is remarkable how little the fetters designed by the Framers have constrained the executive branch, and how readily it has mimicked the monarchy they found so objectionable.
The current system more closely resembles the popular election of a president that the Founders feared. Indeed, George Mason refused to even sign the Constitution because of his prediction that such an outcome would come to pass.
The parliamentary system, on the other hand, maintained several constitutional checks on monarchical authority, and has been adapted by countries like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand with a result of far less corruption and far greater accountability for the head of state. Buckley writes:
Parliamentary governments have far more effective ways to discipline a misbehaving chief executive. It’s a great deal easier to remove an inconvenient prime minister through a simple no-confidence motion or party vote than it is to impeach a sitting president. Not merely are the requirements of a trial in the House of Representatives and a two-thirds majority in the Senate virtually impossible to achieve, but a president may cover up his tracks through his control of information and his ability to delay the proceedings. The separation of powers in the American Constitution was designed to discipline a misbehaving executive, but instead has had the opposite effect, insulating him from criticism.
Judicial Corruption
The executive branch is by no means the sole seat of corruption in the U.S. A stronger presidency was indeed proposed as a remedy for the excessive autonomy and associated corruption of the states during the brief period of the Articles of Confederation. In The Republic of Virtue, Buckley goes into greater detail about how the states abused their authority during this period, and continue to be a source of corruption, requiring reform to the judicial system in particular.
Although the U.S. is known for having less corruption and bribery than many countries, Buckley documents a disturbing number of cases where judges have accepted payment to decide cases in favor of special interests:
A bribe corrupts the heart, said the author of Ecclesiastes. For corruption of the heart, one need look no further than Judge Mark Ciavarella of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and the “kids for cash” scandal that regularly put mildly misbehaving juveniles in lock-up. The story began with tougher drug laws that greatly increased the number of prisoners in Pennsylvania in the 1980s, putting a strain on the state budget. Then someone came up with the bright idea of offloading the jails to the private sector. Privatization was the new big idea, so instead of being guests of the state, the inmates would become guests of a for-profit prison. This was bound to save money, since private enterprise could be counted on to do things more efficiently — or at least more cheaply — than the state. What could go wrong?
The judge began issuing draconian punishments for youthful peccadilloes in order to line the pockets of private prison owners in exchange for a bribe. No one knows how common abuses of judicial power like this might be, but the temptation to crack down via anti-bribery legislation misses the point that more laws cannot paper over a lack of virtue on the part of public officials.
In a similar vein, Buckley notes the difficulty of eliminating special interests from politics altogether. First, there are the free speech concerns around limiting campaign contributions. Second, there is the tendency in corrupt countries for political parties to use stricter anti-corruption laws as weapons against other factions. Largely innocent people are swept into the dragnet of true criminals in government, and the result is fewer good people who want to enter politics at all.
Apart from limiting individual and corporate donations to political candidates, Buckley singles out the most influential actors in Washington D.C., whose power can be limited by appropriate laws, he says. Lobbyists, empowered by connections to retired legislators, reinforce a “revolving door” of power between the private and public sectors. To combat their outsized influence, Buckley proposes a “Chinese Wall” around former Congressmen and women — a lifetime ban preventing them from working as a lobbyists.
The problem is that Congress has little incentive to pass such a law, since it harms their future economic prospects. Against this backdrop, Buckley hopes that Trump will “drain the swamp,” beginning by targeting lobbyists. Trump has already proposed extending the period before a politician can take a job as a lobbyist after leaving office from 2 years to 5 years. Read more:
C-SPAN Book Talk:
What distinguishes garden-variety ideological differences and personal unlikabilility from genuine corruption that we should all oppose? Buckley takes questions from a C-SPAN interviewer and several callers on the nature of corruption, and says we should asked whether politicians are leaving office richer or with better economic prospects than they went in. This singles Clinton out as particularly corrupt, while Trump — who has lost around 1/3 of his net worth since announcing his candidacy — emerges as the more virtuous politician (although problematic in many ways).
Buckley routinely questions whether Trump’s accusers are letting their dislike of his personality and politics get in the way of their thinking on the issue of corruption. He praises Trump’s most significant policy accomplishment to date — the recent tax bill, which he says is good for the middle class:
Comparing the United States’ relatively high corporate tax rate with his home country of Canada, Buckley notes that the bill will spur investment, which will boost employment and incomes for the average worker.
Buy the book on Amazon:
RSVP for the upcoming Cato Institute event on Buckley’s new book, January 23, 2018:
Related Shows:
F.H. Buckley on *The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America* — July 03, 2016
Has America Become an “Elective Monarchy”? — October 26, 2014
