Obama wrong on ‘co-equal’ branches

January 15th, 2008 at 06:34am Pat Cunningham

 

In a recent SPEECH at DePaul University in Chicago, Barack Obama referred to the Constitution having made Congress a “co-equal”  branch of government.

This notion of  co-equal branches is an article of faith among most Americans.  It’s popularly viewed as the provision that gives us our system of checks and balances. But it’s not true.

The irony in this matter is that Obama, like most of the other politicians who play the co-equal card, intend to argue against any presumption that the presidency is pre-eminent.

The fact is that the Founding Fathers did not create a system of co-equal branches of government. Rather, they intended for the legislative branch to be dominant, as is evidenced in the Federalist Papers and even in some of the arguments against ratification of the Constitution from people who wanted co-equal branches and regretted that they weren’t getting them.

Historian Garry Wills presents a convincing case against the “co-equal” theory — and against various other popular myths about the Constitution — in his wonderful book “A Necessary Evil,” which was published in 1999.

In that same year, Wills addressed the “co-equal” issue in THIS LECTURE  at Harvard University. (Scroll down to pages 14 through 17 for the salient parts.)

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