The 2024 election has installed a regime of one-party government in Washington. Come Jan. 20, the presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives will all be controlled by Republicans, many of whom are dedicated foot soldiers in President-elect Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. Add to this the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority, which has already shown itself willing to turn the Constitution upside down to serve the interests of the president-elect.
There is one positive aspect to total Republican domination: One-party rule can be a benefit in terms of democratic accountability.
Advocates of so-called “responsible party government,” going back as far as President Woodrow Wilson, define democracy as “the popular control of government through accountable rulers. To them, only coherence, discipline, and solidarity of political parties can keep the rulers accountable.” However, that assumes that members of political parties respect the norms of constitutional government and display greater loyalty to the prerogatives of the branches of government in which they serve than their political party. The post-election period has already brought worrisome signs that this will not be true of the Republican majority in Congress and on the Supreme Court under Trump.
One-party rule is fine so long as the dominant party does what Madison expected.
The idea of branch loyalty was paramount to the people who wrote the Constitution. Perhaps the best expression of their view is found in Federalist 51. There James Madison argued that the separation of powers among the president, the Congress, and the Supreme Court would be essential in protecting the liberty of Americans. But he warned that the scheme 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 administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack.”
“Ambition,” he said, “must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.”
While Madison did not envision the rise of political parties of the kind that today dominate the political landscape, he hoped that members of Congress would defend the prerogatives of their branch, e.g. their role in giving advice and consent in the appointment of executive and judicial officials, their responsibilities for oversight of executive actions, the power of the purse, etc., against the president.
As Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution notes, “Such checks and balances as the Framers put in place… depended on the separation of the three branches of government, each of which, they believed, would zealously guard its own power and prerogatives. The Framers did not establish safeguards against the possibility that national-party solidarity would transcend state boundaries because they did not imagine such a thing was possible.”
Crucially for the present moment,