A Congress Out of Date

THE people of the United States pride themselves upon their direct and businesslike methods of managing their own affairs. They manifest these national characteristics in the conduct of their state governments ; but in the union of the States for the regulation of federal matters they maintain from generation to generation a most inconvenient, irresponsible, and incoherent system of administration.

On the 2d of December, 1895, opened the first session of the Fifty-Fourth Congress. The members of the House of Representatives who took the oath of office, at that time were elected to their positions on the 4th of November, 1894, thirteen months, lacking only two days, before they occupied their seats. On the 4th of December, 1896, the same Congress, in the natural course of things, will meet for its second and last session. No matter how large the volume of business that urgently demands attention may then be, this session must expire on the 4th of March, 1897, only three months later. One of these months is the shortest of the twelve, and two weeks of this session will be given to a holiday recess.

Here are twin absurdities. The people choose Representatives to execute their will in national legislation. According to tradition, custom, and law, these Representatives do not take the first step toward discharging the duties thus laid upon them by the electors until a year and a month later. They then find that fully six months are required for the work of a session. But when they assemble for the second time, in the usual course, the Constitution prevents their having more than three months, and this brief period is shortened by a fortnight’s recess. Under the most favorable circumstances so uneconomical a system must work vast harm. A year is lost in beginning the operations of every new Congress. The more important the issue that decided the election of its members, and the more widespread the consequences of its possible action, the greater the harm done by this delay in the enactment of the laws that the Representatives were chosen to frame.

The election of Mr. Cleveland and a Democratic House in November, 1892, with the knowledge that the Senate would become Democratic in the following March, assured the country that radical changes would be made in the tariff, but left the business world in doubt as to what those changes would be. This uncertainty greatly aggravated the unfavorable financial conditions due to other causes. Even with the gain from the appointment of the ways and means committee at the extraordinary session convened in August, 1893, the revision of the tariff was delayed nearly a year longer than a rational system of legislation would have required.

A public servant who seeks reflection to an office which he has filled for one term is supposed to stand upon the record which he has made during this term. One of the many absurdities of our congressional system is found in the fact that a Representative who seeks reflection has. under ordinary conditions, sat for only one of the two sessions, and that the second session will not begin until after the seat has been filled by the voters for the next term. Indeed, under the custom of long campaigns in many States, the canvass for the nomination of a Representative in the next Congress begins not long after the opening of the first session of the existing Congress ; and all the nominations are sometimes made before the end of this first session. A verdict upon the complete record of a Representative is thus rendered impossible. Another consequence of this system is a lack of responsibility to the people during the second term of a Congress on the part of those Representatives who have not been reelected, especially such of them as belong to the party which is dominant in the existing Congress, if a “ tidal wave ” has swept that party into the minority in the next Congress. The Republicans, for example, controlled the Fifty-First Congress, and had 176 Representatives when the election occurred in November, 1890. When the second session of this Congress opened, in December, only 52 of these 176 had been reàlected. The people had already passed upon their record, and the 124 who had been rejected had nothing to gain or to lose by their fidelity or treachery to their obligations as public servants during the remaining three months of their official existence. No fear of popular censure, therefore, could restrain them from favoring any reckless or extravagant scheme ; while the Democratic minority might regard such folly with composure because the responsibility for it would attach to an already discredited party.

A more serious result is the possibility that a party which has just been overwhelmingly beaten at the polls, and which logically should have no further control over legislation, may exercise the power which, by an unjustifiable anachronism, it still possesses for three months, to impose upon the people a law against which they have protested. The country actually had a narrow escape from the perpetration of such an outrage only five years ago this winter. While the tariff was undoubtedly the controlling issue in the congressional elections of 1890, the Republicans sustaining and the Democrats opposing the then recently passed McKinley act, another feature of the Republican policy was submitted to the judgment of the people. There had passed the House at the first session, and was to come before the Senate at the second session, the so-called Force Bill, involving a large extension of the power of the federal government over elections in the States, with a view to its especial exercise in the South. During the canvass the Republicans defended this policy, and the Democrats opposed it; and the issue indisputably helped the Democrats to carry the elections. Under normal conditions, this popular verdict should have disposed of the matter so far as passing the pending bill was concerned. The people had pronounced against it, and that should have been the end of it, unless the time should afterwards come when the party which favored the policy could elect a Congress pledged to carry it out. But the President, in his message of December, 1890, urged the Senate to pass the bill, and the leaders of the Republican majority in that body made desperate attempts to follow this advice, which failed only because the Southern Democrats were at last able to make an effective alliance for mutual benefit with some Republicans from the silver States, by which the bill was shelved. Nor was this an isolated case. Attempts have repeatedly been made by a party which had been defeated in the congressional elections to pass a law that would be rejected outright by the Representatives whom the people had just chosen. Sixteen years before the winter of 189091, a Republican Congress met for its second session a month after the country had elected a large Democratic majority to the next House. General Butler, who had himself been beaten for reflection, set out to carry through a radical measure regarding the South, which was also called a force bill; and he would have succeeded if a more liberal element in the Republican party had not made a strenuous opposition, which delayed its inevitable passage by the lower branch so long that the small Democratic minority in the Senate was able to prevent a vote upon it before the expiration of the session.

A similar misuse of power for partisan purposes, and against the clear expression of the popular will at the polls, is possible in the case of the executive, through the system which keeps the President as well as Congress in office until the 4th of March, four months after the people have chosen the next President and House of Representatives. Only the patriotism of President Harrison prevented an abuse of the appointing power three years ago which would have been as inexcusable as the enactment of the Force Bill. In November, 1892, the people indicated by an overwhelming majority their desire that Mr. Cleveland, and not Mr. Harrison, should be their President. This implied that a Democratic executive should make the appointments to high offices during the next four years, with the expectation that he would fill any vacancies which might occur on the bench with members of his own party, as the Republicans had a great preponderance of the judges of every court. A few weeks after the election Justice Lamar of the Supreme Court died. He had been appointed by Mr. Cleveland during his first administration, and was the first Southern Democrat who for thirty-five years had been elevated to the highest bench. Every consideration of fairness dictated the choice of another Democrat from the South as his successor. But the appointing power was still held by a Republican President, and the power of confirmation by a Republican Senate. Mr. Harrison was thus legally able to fill this vacancy with a Republican, who would be in no sense a representative of the section which had so strong a claim to the position. But Mr. Harrison did not take partisan advantage of such a situation, and he showed his breadth and fairness by appointing another Southern Democrat.

The worst feature of the existing system is the fact that we have only such a display of fairness, upon which we can never count, as a protection of the people from partisan abuses and national misfortunes at the hands of discredited executives and legislators, kept in possession of power after a vote of lack of confidence has been recorded at the polls.

The first essential of representative government is that it shall represent. Our system of inaugurating Presidents and convening Congresses makes the federal government constantly unrepresentative, and leaves us to be saved from gross partisan outrages only by good luck or by some unexpected display of patriotism. The greatest absurdity of all is the fact that the forty-five States of the Union (for we might as well begin to count Utah now) maintain in their federal relations a system which not one of them would endure in the government of its own affairs. About half of the States elected governors and legislatures on the same day, in the autumn of 1894, when they voted for members of Congress. In every case the state executives and law-makers thus chosen in November were inducted into office early in the following January. In no State of the Union would it be possible for a legislature which had been rejected at the polls to go on making laws for another session, or for a Republican governor to appoint a member of his party to a life office after the people had voted to replace him with a Democratic executive.

How does it happen that people who conduct their state business sensibly in every commonwealth muddle the administration of their national affairs so badly ? The anomaly is due to the haphazard manner in which the machinery of the federal government got started, and to the tremendous power of tradition and habit. The provisions regarding the election of a governor and legislature, and the time when they shall assume office, are everywhere the result of a careful consideration of the public convenience and interest, and are embodied in the constitutions of the States in the most explicit terms. But the time which shall elapse between the election of a new President and Congress for seventy millions of people and their accession to power, and the period during which they shall retain power after the choice of their successors, are the result, not of deliberate design, but of a combination of circumstances that occurred at the end of the Revolutionary struggle. The Constitution provided that the President “shall hold his office during the term of four years,” but it specified no date upon which the first President’s four years should begin. The Constitution provided that the House of Representatives should be “ composed of members chosen every second year by the people of the several States,” and the upper branch of two Senators from each State, “ chosen by the legislature thereof for SIN: years; ” but the times, places, and manner of holding elections for both houses were left to be “ prescribed in each State by the legislature thereof,” save that Congress might by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the place of choosing Senators. No time was set when the terms of the first Senators and Representatives should begin. No limit was fixed as to the period which should elapse between the election of a House of Representatives and its assembling. The one reference to any month is found in the provision that “ the Congress shall assemble at least once in every year, and such meeting shall be on the first Monday in December, unless they shall by law appoint a different day.”

It was by chance that the terms of the first President, Senators, and Representatives began on the 4th of March instead of the 1st of January or the first Monday in December ; not because the framers of the Constitution thought the opening of spring the best time for inauguration day. The date was actually fixed by the old Congress of the Confederation just before its expiration. Ratifications of the Constitution came so slowly that over nine months after its signature on the 17th of September, 1787, had elapsed before New Hampshire, in the summer of 1788, furnished the ninth, which sufficed for its establishment. The conditions now existed under which the Continental Congress had been authorized by the Constitutional Convention to make arrangements for the choice of the President, and to “ fix the time and place for commencing proceedings.” If the Congress had acted promptly, the 1st of January, 1789, might have been taken as the time, and in that case the terms of all later Presidents, Senators, and Representatives would have begun at the opening of a year. But two full months were wasted in a dreary wrangle as to the place for the seat of government ; and when a decision upon New York was finally reached, it seemed necessary to select a later date, and the first Wednesday of March was chosen instead of the corresponding day in January.

The accident which made George Washington’s first term as President begin on the 4th of March, 1789, has required the inauguration of every one of his successors on the same day of the year, in order that he might “ hold his office during the term of four years.” The tendency toward uniformity of elections has operated to cause the choice of all the Representatives in a new Congress (save the few from Maine, Vermont, and Oregon) one month before the second session of the existing Congress, and thirteen months before the new Congress will meet.

The framers of the federal Constitution never contemplated such an incoherent system of representation as that under which their descendants are now living. No student of governmental methods can see any rational argument for the maintenance of the system. Neither political party has anything to gain or lose by perpetuating it. Everybody would be glad to see a radical reform instituted. Such a reform, moreover, is practicable. The Tuesday after the first Monday in November is evidently to remain the day for the choice of presidential electors and Representatives in Congress. The greater convenience of this season for voting has become so manifest that during the past quarter of a century many States which formerly chose their officials at other times in the year have changed to November.

What is needed is, not a change of election day, but the application of some method by which the President and the Representatives in Congress chosen early in November may come into office early in the following January, at the same time as the governors and the legislators chosen on the same day. Then the will of the people can be executed as promptly and surely in federal as in state legislation ; the voters, when called upon to choose a new House, can pass upon the complete record of their Congressmen during the two sessions ; a defeated party wall have neither temptation nor opportunity to pass laws which have just been demonstrated to be obnoxious to the people ; and a President whose claims for a second term have been rejected will not be able, with the help of a Senate in which a change of party may have been decreed, to fill life offices with representatives of political principles against which the country has pronounced.

An amendment to the federal Constitution will be necessary to bring about the required changes. In order that the terms of a certain President and Congress may begin early in January, the terms of their predecessors in the executive and legislative departments, which would regularly run until the 4th of the following March, must be shortened by two months. No such alteration in the workings of the government machinery can be made offhand. The President who will be elected in November, 1896, must hold his office for four years from the 4th of March, 1897. But the Constitution may be so amended as to provide that the President who will be elected in November, 1900, and inaugurated March 4, 1901, shall retire on the 1st of January, 1905 ; and that thereafter the four-year term shall run from the beginning of the year instead of from the first week in March. At the same time, provision should be made that the House of Representatives elected in 1902 should have its official existence curtailed to the same extent, and that the last two months should be subtracted from the term of Senators who would regularly sit until March 4, 1905. The Fifty-Ninth Congress might then assemble for its first session at the inauguration of the President on the 1st of January, 1905 (or the first Wednesday of January, if an invariable day of the -week be preferred). The Fifty-Eighth Congress could hold its two sessions during the twenty-two months of its existence by meeting the first time on the 4th of March, 1903, and the second time on the 1st of January, 1904.

The desired change is thus seen to be entirely feasible. To carry it out would involve only the adoption by the fortyfive States of precisely the same policy that was followed by one of the forty-five regarding its governor and legislature twenty years ago. Connecticut formerly elected state officers and members of both branches of the Assembly annually in April, to serve one year from the following May. The people concluded to adopt the biennial system of elections, and to change the time of choosing and installing officials to November and January respectively. On the 4th of October, 1875, therefore, they adopted an amendment to their constitution, providing that “ the persons who shall be severally elected to the state offices and General Assembly on the first Monday of April, 1876, shall hold such offices only until the Wednesday after the first Monday of January, 1877; ” that future elections should be held in November, beginning with that month in 1876 ; that the officials then chosen should come into office in January, 1877 ; and that the terms of officials should thereafter run from January instead of from May.

All that is required to bring about such a change in the federal Constitution is organized work to overcome the vis inertiœ, to push the required amendment through both branches of Congress, and to secure its ratification by the necessary number of States. No opposition is to be feared, beyond possibly some faint protest from people who consider the 4th of March a better season than the 1st of January for the ceremonial display which has become incident (though not essential) to a presidential inauguration ; and the well-remembered bleakness of more than one inaugural March day during the last twenty-five years deprives this argument of weight. What is to be apprehended is the indifference of Senators, Representatives, and state legislators to a movement which will have no partisan force behind it, and which will lack evidence of popular support unless some organization shall educate public sentiment to perceive the advantages of the change and demand it, and shall then bring this sentiment to bear upon, first Congress, and afterwards the legislatures of the various States.

Why should not the National Civil Service Reform League take up this work, and push it through its various subordinate associations? Certainly, the accomplishment of the needed change would work a great reform in the civil service by making both the executive and the legislative branches of the federal government far more responsive to the popular will, and far less liable to indulgence in partisan outrages. The rapid progress now making in the application of the merit system to the various branches of the civil service, municipal and stale as well as federal, will enable the members of these associations to devote some of their time in future to other matters. The organization of such bodies of public-spirited men in all parts of the country seems to provide just the means required for effecting a change which can be achieved through a great deal of unselfish work, but in no other way. If the National Civil Service Reform League should take up this matter now, it might see the new system in running order within ten years, and it would establish a lasting claim upon the gratitude of the American people.