Senator Clinton, what was that about co-equal branches of government?
April 22nd, 2008 at 11:25am Pat Cunningham
In a speech last week at the Associated Press annual meeting in Washington, Hillary Clinton said that she will, if elected president, “restore respect for our co-equal branches of government.”
I can only wonder if any of the eminent news executives in the audience recognized that Clinton was wrong about this “co-equal” stuff.
(To be fair to Clinton, it should be noted that her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama, has made the same mistake.)
The notion that the Constitution created three co-equal branches of government 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.
Clinton, like Obama and most of the other politicians who play the co-equal card, intend to argue against any presumption that the presidency is pre-eminent.
But 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.)
Entry Filed under: co-equal branches of government, U.S. Constitution, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama
1 Comment Add your own
1. Menlo Bob | April 22nd, 2008 at 9:16 pm
Hillary was confused into thinking that she was the co-president. Co-dependent co-conspirator was more like it.
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