Given that Bryan
spent the prime years of his early adulthood in Pennsylvania, it should come as
little surprise that the vision of government which he described in Centinel I
as being perfectly suited to, “Best secure the rights of the people” almost
perfectly aligned with the framework described in his home state’s
constitution. Not only did he believe a unicameral legislature to be the best
means by which a given state might accomplish the creation and maintenance of
law, but he also affirmed that frequent elections and strict limits upon
repeated terms of public service constituted necessary safeguards against
permanency in office and its associated sins. With the government of
Pennsylvania as it existed in 1787 accordingly serving as a model, Bryan’s
rationale would seem clear enough in practice. Having determined to seek
redress for a grievance which they believe to have originated in the State
House in Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania petitioner might well have taken
comfort in there being only four institutions with which to contend. If the
issue at hand was indeed a matter for that state government rather than any
county or municipal authority, the cause thereof - or some form of remedy – could reasonably
expect to be found in the General Assembly, the Executive Council, the Supreme
Court, or the Council of Censors.
Notwithstanding
the fact that the justices of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court were then appointed
to seven year terms by the President and the Executive Council, each of these
bodies existed wholly independent of the others in terms of their selection and
responsibilities. Assemblymen, Councilors, and Censors were all popularly
elected, and none of the powers which these officers possessed substantially
overlapped with those of their colleagues in the other branches of government.
Assemblymen, for instance, were never forced to contend with the Executive
Council countermanding their efforts to make law for the people of
Pennsylvania. Nor were the members of the Executive Council expected to submit
the various appointments it was their duty to make to the scrutiny of the
Assembly or the Censors. Even the justices of the Supreme Court, whose nominal independence
was somewhat lessened by their being beholden for their offices to another
branch of government, were kept from weighing in on political questions which
would in other states have fallen under their purview. A case like Trevett v. Weeden (1786), in which the
Supreme Court of Rhode Island invalidated an act of the legislature which it
found to be in violation of the state constitution, would not have been
possible in contemporary Pennsylvania, such responsibility having been
explicitly allocated to the aforementioned Council of Censors.
Granted, this
species of distinct administrative separation could not be expected to
constitute a perpetual guarantee of integrity and justice on the part of the
magistrates and institutions it acted upon. Ensuring that every citizen living
under the auspices of a government could consistently identify the source of a
given policy would surely have proven a rather hollow guarantee if the actors
deemed responsible for the relevant error or oversight were not also faced with
the prospect of replacement at the hands of those they had injured.
Fortunately, the framers of Pennsylvania’s 1776 constitution had foreseen the
potential for such an egregious gap in the public accountability of the
magistrates whose powers they had set themselves to describing. Their answer,
accordingly, was a mixture of frequent elections and terms limits, the value of
which Samuel Bryan later espoused in the cited text of Centinel I. A unicameral
legislature forming the basis of his preferred form of republican government,
he further explained that the members of this selfsame body should be, “Necessarily
excluded by rotation from permanency [.]” By the terms of the aforementioned
constitution of Pennsylvania, this kind of “rotation” had included Assemblymen,
who were subject to yearly election and limited to serving no more than four
years in every seven, members of the Executive Council, who were constrained to
three year terms with a period of four years required to elapse before a
possible reelection, and Censors, who were to be chosen at intervals of seven
years.
The purpose of
such measures, as Bryan affirmed, was to prevent any office holder from
obtaining a permanent position – and gaining permanent access to power – within
the relevant government. Corruption, naturally, was the principle enemy of this
kind of initiative, patronage and its attendant vices – cronyism, fraud,
inefficiency, etc. – ever gaining strength from the continued exercise of power
by a single individual or party. There was also something to be said for the
change in perspective that a frequent rotation of public officials was bound to
produce. Elected continuously to the same position for a decade or more, any
member of a given legislature might very easily – and unknowingly – begin to
lose touch with the needs, desires, and concerns of their nominal constituents.
Having lived for the better part of those ten years at some distance from the
district they were chosen to represent, their life would in due time mold itself
to the rhythms of the legislative cycle, with sessions, committee hearings, and
votes gradually assuming a far greater importance than the country fetes and
town meetings from which their public support was first drawn. While this kind
of acute familiarity with the mechanics of legislation would doubtless render
the official in question better able to navigate the often treacherous currents
of popular government than someone possessed of less experience, it would
likely also render them less capable of accurately speaking to and advocating
for the specific interests of their district.
This would seem a
particularly relevant consideration in the context of a region which suddenly
finds itself undergoing rapid and/or drastic demographic or economic change.
The magistrate in question might once have accurately represented the general
character of the constituency from which they were elected. But the rapid
acceleration of a given trend towards or away from this or that industry,
resulting in a shift in the commercial status quo, an influx of economic
migrants, or an inverse depopulation, could very easily lead to a significant
alteration in the concerns of the relevant community and its residents. Having
nevertheless managed to secure repeated reelections due to some combination of
personal popularity, patronage, and institutional inertia, the incumbent
legislator would very likely go on representing that selfsame community in
spite of the fact that their knowledge of its needs was in the process of
steadily fading to a state of uselessness. Mandatory term limits, though
necessarily constraining the public from exercising absolute freedom of choice,
would seem a very simple and very effective means of preventing this outcome
from every taking place. Forced, by law, to cast aside their sitting
representative after a set number of years in office, the residents of the
various districts in question would be effectively prevented – and protected –
from becoming locked into a choice which might in time prove a great detriment.
Having chosen, once, a lawyer as their advocate, they would be made to
substitute a merchant in their place, followed by a farmer, a retired military
officer, a banker, or an artisan. Each of these individuals would bring a fresh
perspective to bear on the legislative processes by which their community was
bound, speak on behalf of some new and different profession, and generally
ensure that no single party or interest was permitted to enjoy a monopoly on
political power.
As presented to
the various states in 1787, however, the United States Constitution was not
designed to promote what would seem to be such an outwardly desirable outcome.
Though said document did set any number of limitations upon how long a given
officer of state would be able to serve before facing reelection, none of these
same officials were made to simultaneously face permanent removal from office
following the completion of a set interval of service. Senators enjoyed the
most generous terms, facing election only once every six years, while the
President was required to return to the people every four years, and
Representatives every other year. Granting that this would seem to compare
favorably enough to the cited conditions of the constitution of Pennsylvania –
which mandated, after all, that Censors would stand for election once every
seven years, Counselors every three year, and Assemblymen every single year –
the aforementioned lack of accompanying terms limits would seem to severely
lessen the effectiveness of these otherwise highly prudent regulations. Having
lived under that selfsame state constitution for a decade – during which time
he doubtless became accustomed to the notion that few, if any, public officials
should be permitted to submit their names for reelection ad infinitum – Samuel
Bryan would assuredly have viewed this particular quality of the proposed
national constitution with abiding concern. If the residents of a given
district, he would doubtless have been given to ask, were under no obligation
to exchange their beloved, or influential, or well-connected representative for
another, why should they not simply adopt the most straightforward – and
potentially rewarding – path and elect the same person every time? If a
President should manage, over the course of his initial years in office, to construct
a coalition of parties and interests whose support could guarantee his
perpetual reelection, what could possibly stop exactly that from taking place?
His fellow citizens, Bryan had previously implied, being somewhat less
attentive to matters of public administration than was perhaps strictly
desirable, such outcomes undoubtedly appeared to him as being far from
unlikely.
This seemed
essentially to form one of the principal complaints with which Samuel Bryan
sought to attack the United States Constitution in the text of Centinel I.
People, he either implied or outright stated, could not necessarily be trusted
to act in their own best interests within the context of popular government.
They were, of course, possessed of certain unalienable rights which it was the
duty of government to recognize and protect. But in addition to being sovereign
in their persons, they were also possessed of necessarily limited faculties. Sometimes
they were not as vigilant as they should have been in regards to the public
institutions which most affected their lives. And often they made very
significant political choices based on misapprehensions or on short-term
thinking. No doubt Bryan would have encouraged his fellow citizens to correct
these failings, engage more critically with the various forms of government
they encountered in their daily lives, and cultivate the quality of individual
virtue which a republic arguably required to function. But, in the meantime,
there was no sense in punishing humans for being human, or pretending as though
they were collectively more attentive than was actually the case. The cited
critiques of the United States Constitution which Bryan put forward in the text
of Centinel I, in addition to showing the effects of his upbringing in 1780s
Pennsylvania, seemed to speak to this conviction quite strongly.
Among its various
other qualities which he believed were less than ideal, Bryan appeared
substantially convinced that the proposed national charter was both
impractically complex and hopelessly optimistic. People being naturally prone
to lose interest in that which is not immediately and easily explicable, he
avowed that any government whose structure and purpose was not discernible at a
glance was unlikely to operate under the degree of public scrutiny necessary to
keep it from becoming dangerous. Just so, Bryan also observed that, unless
explicitly prevented from doing so, the residents of a given constituency would
very likely continue to elect the same magistrate time and again. Not only
would this threaten to make corruption an accepted part of public life, but it
would also serve to steadily reduce the quality of the relevant community’s
representation. The answer, in regard to these challenges as in so many others
he determined to tackle in the text of Centinel I, was simplicity itself. Make
government as straightforward as possible, Bryan affirmed, and keep the rate of
turnover high. In this way, not only would fewer people be given to shrug at
the actions of their administrators for want of a clearer understanding of what
they were doing and why, thus arguably preventing those same administrators
from surreptitiously acting in their own interests rather than those of the
general public. They would also be far more likely to enjoy the benefit of
multiple and shifting perspectives in government, greater transparency, and
perhaps even the chance to serve their communities themselves in the absence of
an entrenched, patronage-dispensing political class. The proposed constitution
could not do these things, was not structurally equipped to do them, and it was
evidently for that reason – among others – that Samuel Bryan tended to oppose
it.
No comments:
Post a Comment