government and politics in the united states

Questions for understanding and discussion

1.Why are Americans suspicious of a strong government?

2.What are the three branches of the government?

3.What is the organization and responsibility of the legislative branch?

4.What are the roles and powers of the president defined by the Constitution?

5.What is the responsibility of the judicial branch?

6.How does the concept “checks and balances” work in the US government?

7.What is the electoral college? How does it work?

8. What effect did the ideals of the free individual have on the development of the

government before the Great Depression of the 1930s? Why?

9.What major effect did the Great Depression have on the government?

10.What are special interest groups? Why are they formed and who do they represent?

11.How do special interest group affect how the government operates?

12.What are the symbols of the two political parties? How would you describe their images?

13.what personal qualities do you think political leaders should have? Who do you admire?

14.How is the government of our country organized? what are the advantages and disadvantages of Chinese government as is compared with American government? 15.As you can read in the material, lobby groups affect the operation of a government in some ways. Who do you think is more trustworthy—business or government leaders?

Government and Politics in the United States

A wise and frugal Government shall restrain men

from injuring one another, and shall leave them

otherwise free to regulate their own pursuit of

industry and improvements.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) A Suspicion of Strong Government

The ideal of the free individual has had a profound effect on the way Americans view their government. Traditionally, there has been a deep suspicion that government is the natural enemy of freedom, even if it is elected by the people. The bigger and stronger the government becomes, the more dangerous many Americans believe it is to their individual freedom.

This suspicion of strong government goes back to the men who led the American Revolution in 1776. These men believed the government of Great Britain wanted to excessive taxes and other measures which would ultimately benefit the British aristocracy and monarchy. Thomas Paine, the famous revolutionary writer, expressed the view of other American revolutionists when he said, “Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.”

The Organization of the American Government

The way in which the national government is organized in the U.S. Constitution provides an excellent illustration of the American suspicion of governmental power. The provisions of the Constitution are more concerned with keeping the government from doing evil than with enabling it to do good. The national government, for example, is divided into three separate branches. This division of governmental power is based on the belief that if any one part or branch of government has all, or even most of the power, it will become a threat to the freedom of individual citizens.

The legislative or lawmaking branch of the government is called the Congress. Congress has two houses—the Senate, with two senators from each state regardless of the size of its population, and the House of Representatives, consisting of a total of 435 representatives divided among the fifty states by population. (in the House, states with large populations have more representatives than states with small populations, while in the Senate, each state has equal representation.) The president, or chief executive branch, which has responsibility to carry out the laws. The Supreme Court and lower national courts make up the judicial branch. The judicial branch settles disputes about the exact meaning of the law through court cases. It both interprets the law and determines whether the law is constitutional—that is, whether the law is permitted under the U.S. Constitution.

If any one of the three branches starts to abuse its power, the other two many join together to stop it, through a system of checks and balances. The Constitution is most careful in balancing the powers of the legislative and executive branches of the government because these two (Congress and the president) are the most powerful of

the three branches. In almost every important area of governmental activity, such as the power to make laws, to declare war, or to conclude treaties with foreign countries, the Constitution gives each of these two branches enough power to prevent the other from acting on its own.

In the American political system, the president leads the executive branch of the federal government and also has important power in legislative and judicial matters. The Constitution defines his roles and powers in the following manner.

Chief of State

The president represents the nation as the head of state, symbolizing national unity and speaking on behalf of the American people to the world. He also grants reprieves and pardons to anyone convicted of breaking a federal law except in impeachment.(u nder the US Constitution, the president may be removed from office if he is impeached and found guilty of high crimes or other improper acts. This is the only way a president can legally be removed from office.)

Chief Administrator

The president’s responsibility is to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed”. To help the president enforce laws passed by Congress, the Constitution mandates him to supervise the operations of the executive branch of government, issue executive orders, and prepare the government’s annual budget for submission to Congress. Additionally, the Constitution authorizes him to appoint, with the advice and consent of the Senate, ambassadors, members of the Cabinet, federal judges, including justices of the Supreme Court, and other federal officers. The president may also remove executive officials at h is discrecion.

Chief Legislator

The president has the principal responsibility for the initiation of national policy. The Constitution requires the president to periodically inform the Congress of “the State of the Union”, which often outlines the president’s legislative proposals for the coming year, and to “recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient”. The Constitution also authorizes the president to convene either or both houses of Congress on “extraordinary occasions”. In keeping with the system of checks and balances, the Constitution gives the president the authority to veto legislation passed by Congress.

Chief Diplomat

The president’s constitutional powers in foreign affairs are relatively modest. As the nation’s chief diplomat, the presidents represents the United States in its relationships with governments of other countries. He has the power to make treaties with foreign nations. The president may also negotiate “executive agreements” with other nations.

Commander-in-Chief

As Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, the president has a powerful voice in national and internationally affairs. While the power to declare war is constitutionally vested in Congress, the president commands and directs the military and is responsible for appointing military officers and planning military strategy.

Observers from other countries are often confused by the American system. The national government may seem to speak with two conflicting voices, that of the president and that of Congress. For example, a treaty with a foreign government signed by the president dies if the Senate refuses to ratify it—that is, if the Senate doesn’t vote to accept it. The Senate has certain powers over foreign treaties and military actions. This requires the president to have “the advice and consent of the Senate” before taking certain action of the international front.

On the other hand, the president may prevent a bill passed by Congress from becoming law. When both houses of Congress have agreed on a piece of legislation or counting Sundays. At that point, there are four possibilities:

1.The president agrees with the bill, signs it, and it becomes law.

2.The president disagrees with the bill, vetoes it, and sends it back to the

Congress with his reasons for refusing to sign it. If two-thirds of both the

House and the Senate vote to override the president’s veto, the bill becomes

law.

3.The president may take no action and after ten days (not counting Sundays),

the bill becomes law without his signature.

4.If the Congress adjourns before the ten-day period is over, and the president

has neither signed nor vetoed the bill, it is defeated. This is called a pocket

veto. Presidents sometimes do this with bill s they do not like but do not want

to go on record as having vetoed.

Although the American system of divided governmental power strikes many observers as inefficient and even disorganized, most Americans still strongly believe in it for two reasons: (1) It has been able to meet the challenges of the past, and (2) it gives strong protection to individual freedoms.

In addition to dividing government powers into three branches, the Constitution includes a Bill of Rights which is designed to protect specific individual rights and freedoms from government interference. Some of the guarantees in the Bill of Rights concern the freedom of expression. The government may not interfere with an individual’s freedom of speech or freedom of religious worship. The Bill of Rights also guarantees the right of a fair criminal procedure for those accused of breaking laws. Thus, the Bill of Rights is another statement of the American belief in the importance of individual freedom.

The president and both house of Congress have almost complete political independence from each other because they are all chosen in separate elections. For example, the election of the Congress does not determine who will be elected president, and the presidential election does not determine who will be elected to either house of Congress. It is quite possible in the American system to have the leader of one political party win the presidency while the other major political party wins most of the seats in Congress. It is also important to remember that the elections of the members of the two houses of Congress are separate from each other. Thus, the Republicans may control one house, while the Democrats may control the other. During the late 1900s, while most of the presidents were Republican, the Democrats often controlled one or both of the houses of Congress. In 1994, the reverse happened:

While Bill Clinton, a Democrat, was president, the Republicans won control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Then in the early 2000s, for a time the Republican Party controlled the presidency (George W. Bush) and both houses of Congress.

In order to understand what is happening in Washington, it is important to know not only the party of the president, but also which parties control the House and the Senate. Because both the House of Representatives and the Senate must agree on all legislation before it goes to the president, legislation may pass one house but be blocked in the other. Furthermore, the party in control of House or Senate has the potential of changing every two years. Members of the House of Representatives are elected for two-year terms, while senators serve six-year terms. The Senate terms are staggered so that only one-third of the senators run for re-election each time the House elections are held, every two years.

Presidential elections are held every four years, on the first Tuesday in November. When the Constitution was written, the founding fathers had a disagreement about how the president should be elected. Some did not want the members of Congress to choose the president, and others were afraid to leave the choice entirely to the voters. The result was a compromise—the electoral college, a system for indirectly electing the president. The system persists today. In presidential elections, people are actually voting for representatives called electors, and it is these electors who officially choose the president. With the electoral college system, the winner of the plurality (the highest number) of each states’popular votes gets all of that state’s electoral votes. The number of each state’s electoral votes is equal to the total number of their representatives in the House and the Senate. Though the number of electoral votes varies according to each state’s population, it is still possible for a person to be elected president without getting the highest number of the popular, or individual, votes.

Although Americans were aware of the electoral college system, the average voter did not give it much thought until the election of 2000. There had been only three previous instances of presidents ever losing the popular vote but winning the electoral vote, and it seemed a remote possibility. The last time it had happened was in 1888, when Benjamin Harrison won the presidency even though Grover Cleveland had majority of popular votes. All through the 1900s, the presidents who were elected had won at least a plurality, the highest number of the popular votes, in addition to winning the electoral votes. However, in the election of 2000, Al Gore, the Democratic candidate, won more popular votes than George W Bush, the Republican candidate, but Bush won the most electoral votes and became president. In the 2004 election between George W. Bush and John Kerry, the electoral college was not an issue, because Bush won both the popular vote and the electoral vote.

The result sent shock waves through the American political system. One reason was that the vote was incredibly close, and several states had to count their votes a second time. The state with the most controversial results was Florida, where the governor of the state was Jeb Bush, George W. Bush’s brother. Although Gore had won the popular vote nationwide, whoever won the twenty-five Florida electoral votes would win the election. The first count of the votes showed a difference of less than

one-half of 1 percent, so there was a recount by machine. This found an even smaller margin, fewer than 1000 votes separating the two candidates.

There were many questions about the voting procedures in Florida, especially about certain ballots marked by punching a hole next to the name of the candidate. Some of the holes were not punched all the way through, leaving what’s called a “hanging chad.” Therefore, a number of the ballots had to be recounted and examined by hand. The results were extremely close. The recount showed Bush winning by 537 votes out of the almost 6 million votes cast. The Florida government declared Bush the winner, but the Gore campaign wanted more ballots recounted because the numbers were so close. After a series of legal challenges, the U.S. Supreme Court decided about a month after the election that the Florida state legislature had the right to stop recounting the ballots and certify the electoral votes. The Supreme Court ruled that a state has the ultimate right to determine how its electors are chosen.

The Ideal of the Free Individual

In the late 1700s, most Americans expected the new national government created by the Constitution to leave them alone to pursue their individual goals. They believed the central purpose of government was to create the conditions most favorable to the development of the free individual.

Before the Civil War of the 1860s, the American ideal of the free individual was the frontier settler and the small farmer. President Thomas Jefferson expressed this ideal when he said, “ Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people…” Jefferson glorified farmers for being free individuals who relied on no one but themselves for their daily needs. Being dependent on none but themselves, farmers, he believed, were the most honest of citizens. Throughout his life Jefferson favored a small, weak form of government, which he believed would encourage the development of a nation of free, self-reliant farmer citizens.

From the end of the Civil War until the Great Depression of the 1930s, the successful businessperson replaced the farmer and the frontier settler as the ideal expression of the free individual. The prevailing view of Americans was that government should not interfere in business. If it were to do so, it would threaten the development of free individuals whose competitive spirit, self-reliance, and hard work were developing the United States into a land of greater and greater material prosperity.

Government, therefore, remained small and inactive in relation to the great size of the nation and the amount of power held by business corporations. Some government regulations were in place during this period, but these had only a small impact on business practices. From the 1870s until the 1930s, business organizations and ideals dominated American government and politics. During much of this time, the Republican Party was in power, and it strongly supported these policies.

The Development of Big Government

Traditionally, Republicans have favored letting business compete with little or no government regulation: Let the free enterprise system regulate itself in the marketplace. On the other hand, Democrats have traditionally favored using government to regulate businesses, protect consumers and workers, and also to solve

social problems. Not surprisingly, it was a Democratic president who presided ove the creation of “big government.”

The Great Depression of the 1930s greatly weakened the businessperson’s position as the American ideal of the free individual, and big business lost respect. The Depression also created the need for emergency government action to help the needy on a scale never before seen in the Untied States in peacetime. As a result, the idea that government should be small and inactive was largely abandoned. Moreover, the ideal of the free individual underwent some very important changes.

The widespread unemployment and other economic hardships of the Depression gave rise to the new assumption that individual could not be expected to rely solely on themselves in providing for their economic security. This new assumption, in turn, led to a large and active role for the national government in helping individuals, meet their daily needs. The Democratic Party, led by President Franklin Roosevelt, brought about a number of changes in the 1930s, which he referred to as an “New Deal ” for Americans.

Even with the return of prosperity after the Depression and World War II (1941-1945), the growth of government’s role in helping to provide economic security for individuals did not end. It continued in the prosperous postwar years, and it was greatly expanded during the presidency of another Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, in ther 1960s. Roosevelt’s New Deal grew into what some saw as a permanent “welfare state”that provided payments for retired persons, government checks for the unemployed, support for families with dependent children and no father to provide income, health care for the poor and the elderly, and other benefits for needy persons.

Some Americans fear that economic security provided by the government will weaken self-reliance, and ideal that is closely associated in the minds of Americans with individual freedom. At worst, it presents a danger to individual freedom by making an increasing number of Americans dependent of the government instead of on themselves. In this way, the strong traditions of individualism and self-reliance have made Americans less accepting of welfare programs than the citizens of other democracies such as those in western Europe, which have more extensive welfare programs than those of the United States. Those fears led to the passing of major reforms in the welfare system in 1996, under President Clinton, a Democrat with a Republican-controlled Congress. Limits were set on the number of years a person could receive welfare payments, and the states were given more responsibility for deciding who is eligible for support.

On the other hand, most Americans would certainly not consider their government retirement benefits under Social Security or Medicare (health care for the retired ) as welfare payments. Americans see these programs as true “entitlements.”They have paid a portion of their salaries into the system, and they feel that they are entitled to this government support after they retire. However, the future of Social Security is in question. As the population ages, there are fewer younger workers and their employers paying Social Security taxes into the system, and more retired workers taking money out. Americans are living longer in retirement and their medical expenses are rising. Because older Americans are more likely than young

people to vote, politicians pay attention to their needs. They want the older Americans’ votes.

The Role of Special Interest Groups

Practically all social and economic classes of Americans have seen the need to take advantage of , or to protect themselves from, the actions of government, especially the national government. To accomplish this, Americans with similar interests have formed special interest groups to more effectively influence the actions of government. These special interest groups are often called “lobbying groups”or “pressure groups.”Although lobbying groups have existed throughout the nation’s history, they have grown significantly in both numbers and power since the late 1900s.

The National Rifle Association （mentioned in Chapter 4）is an example of a powerful and effective lobby. Its members are mostly people who own guns for hunting, target practice, and personal protections. The NRA, however, receives a great deal of money from business corporations that manufacture guns. Because of the attitudes and interests of its members, the NRA strongly opposes almost all government restrictions on the sale of both handguns and rifles. Even though most of the general public favors gun control, the NRA is able to block the passage of most gun-control legislation.

Although few interest groups have been as successful as the NRA, most well-organized interest groups have achieved a large measure of success. By organizing into groups which put pressure on government officials, people can gain more rewards and avoid more government restrictions than if they tried to do it as individuals.

With this principle in mind, business interest groups have multiplied in recent decades so that most major trades, business, and even professions have their lobbyists in Washington. There are influential lobbies representing labor unions, farm groups, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and specific industries such as oil and natural gas, pharmaceuticals, and biotechnology. Interest groups representing ethnic groups such as African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Jewish Americans have also expanded. There are also interest groups representing a variety of ideals or causes that want government support. These include groups pressing for a clean environment and those promoting greater protection for consumers. As one congressman exclaimed, “Everybody in American has a lobby!”

The political tendency of recent decades is for the size of the government to bring about an increase in t he number and size of interest groups, and for the greater demands made on the government by interest groups to increase the size of the government. Groups such as the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) not only demand new government programs, regulations, and benefits for their members, they also strongly resist any attempts to reduce existing programs that they believe protect their interests. The result of this continuing cycle can be referred to as “interest group government.” No single interest dominates government and politics as business groups did before the Great Depression. Instead, government and politics are based on reaching compromises with a large number of groups and pleasing as many

as possible.

The New Individualism: Interest Group Government

Interest group government can be seen as expressing a new form of American individualism. Unlike the old frontier or business individualism, individuals do not claim to succeed on their own, but rather by forming groups to influence the government. Still, it is individuals, their rights, their interests, and their ambitions, not those of the nation as a whole, that are the focus of their attention. The interest groups is no more than a tool to achieve the goals of the individual by influencing the government.

Although many Americans have benefited in some way of from government-sponsored programs, some experts believe that interest group government is harmful to the United States. The effect on politicians is enormous. First, interest groups often focus on one issue that is more important to their members than all others. For example, some people feel very strongly that abortion should not be legal in the United States. They may choose to vote for candidates primarily because of their stand on the abortion issue. Generally, because their members feel so strongly, lobby groups are able to promise that their members will vote for a candidate if he or she promises to support their issue once elected.

Second, members of special interest groups contribute large sums of money to election campaigns. Because candidates must rely mostly on private, not public, funding, they are often forced to depend on special interest groups for their campaign funds. Candidates at all levels of government-national, state, and local-must spend enormous amounts of their time raising funds for their re-election. For example, because members of the House of Representatives are elected every two years, they engage in continual fund-raising. Senators and presidential candidates are also pressured. The situation has become so bad that many people are agreeing with the statement, “We have the best government that money can buy!” There are, however, whose who are still trying to reform the system. In 2002, the McCain-Feingold Act brought some reforms, but these changes were challenged in court. Many politicians are afraid to reform the system because they are so dependent on it, and there is little support for instituting public funding and doing away with private contributions altogether. Both political parties say they favor campaign reform, but it does not come. Both are probably equally dependent on the current system.

The Political Landscape in the 2000s

In order to understand the political landscape of the United States, one should first look at the historical, traditional positions of the two major political parties- the Republicans and the Democrats. The Democratic Party emerged from the Neew Deal as the supporter of the idea that government should do more for all classes and all kinds of Americans. For this reason, poorer and less-privileged Americans tended to support the Democratic Party. Blacks and other nonwhite minorities (such as Hispanics) tended to vote for Democrats, as did women’s rights groups. Therefore, the Democratic Party was traditionally more racially and ethnically diverse than the Republican Party. This diversity was reflected when Democrat Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992 after twelve years of Republican presidents. In naming his

cabinet, the top leaders of the government bureaucracy, President Clinton said that he wanted it to reflect the diversity of American. He then appointed six women, four blacks, and two Hispanics to his cabinet.

The Republican Party was not changed by the New Deal as much as the Democratic Party was. The Republicans continued to stress anti-government and pro-business ideas much as they had before the Great Depression. While Democrats tended to see government action as part of the solution to many problems, Republicans tended to see government action as adding to America’s problems. The best hope for America, Republicans argued, was to reduce the number of things government does and to give American business more freedom from government taxes, rules, and requirements. Republicans gained most of their political strength from business groups and from the strong anti-government attitudes of millions of Americans. However, with the leadership of President George W. Bush, the Republican Party has made a strong effort to attract more minority voters, particularly Hispanics. And when Bush appointed his cabinet, it was even more racially and ethnically mixed than Clinton’s cabinets had been.

In the meantime, the number of Americans who consider themselves neither Republicans nor Democrats has been growing. They consider themselves Independents. From time to time there are attempts to form a third part to capture the independent voters, but the two-party tradition is very strong in the United States. Third parties have succeeded in getting only a small percentage of the votes for president. Sometimes third-party candidates have taken enough votes away from the Republican or Democratic candidates to affect the outcome of a close election. Some believe that Ralph Nader attracted Democratic voters to cause Gore to lose to Bush in 2000.

In order to get the nomination of their party, Republican and Democratic candidates must both appeal to their traditional, hardcore supporters who control the nominating process. For the Republicans, the process tends to be controlled by conservatives on the right. For the Democrats, the nominating process tends to be controlled by liberals on the left. However, once they have been nominated and the campaign begins, both Democrats and Republicans tend to move toward the center, where the majority of the American voters are. In fact, this has become a necessary strategy. (By 2004, the country was evenly divided—one-third Democrat, and one-third Independent. ) The parties need to appeal to their traditional bases, and also to the independent center, in order to even a plurality.

Many observers have questioned whether the traditional stances of either party truly serve the needs of the country. It may be that neither the Republican idea of national prosperity through the dominance of business groups, nor the Democratic idea of prosperity through government action to help the many diverse groups of Americans, is adequate to meet the common problems facing Americans in the twenty-first century.