Who better represents the people: Congress, or the president?
Representation brings legitimacy, and power
Who better represents the will of the American people: The president or Congress?
The Founding Fathers thought the answer was Congress. That’s why they gave Congress the power to write laws, raise taxes, set the federal budget, and approve treaties - what more to governing is there?
The president, on the other hand, was the executive, created by the Founders to execute Congress’s will. If the term “project manager” had existed in 1787, the band would probably be striking up “Hail to the project manager” whenever the president entered the room.
But that opinion, that Congress is the real show, began to change in the 19th century. Andrew Jackson was the first executive to argue the president, not Congress, best represents the will of the American people. Congressmen are only voted into office by their districts, he argued. The president is elected by everyone.
The presidency grew in power that century, too. Thomas Jefferson asserted that presidents could acquire new territory when he purchased the vast Louisiana territory, despite knowing the constitution gave him no such right. James K. Polk showed presidents can manufacture war when they desire by ordering an army into territory that the United States and Mexico both claimed they owned, prompting a skirmish that Congress felt must be answered by an official declaration of war. And Abraham Lincoln made drastic grabs at new presidential powers when he summoned an army, suspended habeas corpus, and issued the emancipation proclamation during the civil war.
By Century’s end, the president was arguably Congress’ equal in power. In the decades that followed, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt would take the presidency’s power to new heights, making it the center of a powerful, bureaucratic state.
But power is one thing and legitimacy another. The question still remains - who best represents the will of the American people?
Let’s do the democratic thing and see what the voters say.
In the 2020 election (the last time Congress and the president were on the ballot at the same time), the winning presidential candidate received 80,883,689 of the 158,481,688 votes cast (73.9m ballots were cast for the opposition party and 5m for third-party candidates or write-ins). The 80.9-million votes Joe Biden received were 51% presidential ballots cast.
If you add up the votes cast for the 435 members of Congress who won their elections in 2020, they accumulated 96,504,414 of the 153,431,405 ballots cast. Congress effectively won 62.9% of the vote.
So does Congress best represent the American people?
True, many congressional seats are gerrymandered to the point where politicians are often picking their voters instead of voters picking their politicians. As a result, Congress has been controlled by a party that lost the congressional popular vote 10 times: 1846, 1848, 1858, 1880, 1888, 1914, 1942, 1952, 1996, and 2012. But the electoral college has its own flaws, too.
Five presidents (John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, George W Bush, and Donald Trump) have been elected president despite losing the popular vote.
The answer may come down to the moment. The will of the American people shifts and changes from moment to moment and topic to topic. Legislators and presidents will constantly try to keep up with that will, because they crave the legitimacy and power it confers. Regardless of any innate advantage either body holds, it can be lost in a news cycle if they lose the pulse of the American people.
And then, well. That’s what we have elections for.