 To save our democracy, we have to make the U.S. government faster, more efficient and more effective. And we can do that by expanding the power of the executive branch to use fast-track authority to approve all types of legislation, believes Stanford political scientist Terry Moe. Moe, who's the author of President Populism and the Crisis of Democracy, wants Congress to have the power to approve or deny laws through an up-or-down vote, but not to add amendments or filibuster their passage. The Cato Institute's Gene Healy says that non-libertarians of all political persuasions suffer from a dangerous devotion to the boundless nature of presidential responsibility. Healy, who's the author of The Cult of the Presidency, says that instead of giving the executive branch more legislative authority, presidential powers must be brought back to their constitutional limits. Do U.S. presidents need a fast-track? Or should their power be sharply curtailed? Terry Moe and Gene Healy went head-to-head on this issue in a recent virtual Soho Forum debate, moderated by Soho Forum director Gene Epstein. Tonight's resolution reads, to make the federal government more effective, presidents should be given fast-track authority to propose bills for all types of legislation that Congress must approve or deny by majority vote and without change. Terry Moe will be defending the resolution. Cato Institute VP Gene Healy will be opposing the resolution. And now, again, speaking on behalf of the resolution, Professor Terry Moe, you have 15 minutes. Take it away, Terry. Let me start out with the following simple statement. We in the United States have a government that just doesn't work. It's chronically ineffective and incapable of dealing with the complex, hugely consequential problems of modern times. For example, for decades it's done a very bad job of dealing with the horribly disruptive effects of globalization and technological change, which have led to job losses, to a hollowing out of manufacturing, to a decimation of many local communities, especially rural communities, to the opioid crisis, and to great financial loss, insecurity and stress among tens of millions of Americans. We also have an unworkable immigration system that has caused widespread cultural and economic concern. And then there are serious problems of healthcare, pollution, a crumbling infrastructure, and much more, including, needless to say, the pandemic. Well, our government has been highly ineffective at dealing with all of these. The result is not only that our society and our people are worse off, which in itself needless to say, is hugely important. It's also that ineffective government is literally dangerous to our democracy because it leads to alienation, disaffection, and anger with our system of government as the rise of populism and Donald Trump well demonstrates. This anti-system rage leads to a rejection of our democratic institutions, and it threatens to bring our democracy down. The fact is, a democratic government that can't respond to the needs of its citizens and respond effectively cannot survive. This is true everywhere, throughout the world, and it's true for the United States. We're not special in that regard. So, why is American government so ineffective? Obviously, many factors are at work, polarization, most notably, but the fundamentals of this problem can be traced back to the Constitution itself. I know this sounds like sacrilege. We all love the Constitution, and it's truly a watershed achievement in the entire history of human self-governance. But we need to keep in mind that the Framers wrote the Constitution more than 230 years ago, and while the Bill of Rights is timeless, the specific architecture of government laid out in the rest of the Constitution is a different matter. The Framers designed a government for their times. For a simple, isolated, agrarian society of less than four million people, most of them farmers. Government was not expected to do much then, and the Framers purposely designed a government that couldn't do much. They designed a government that separated authority across the branches, and filled it with checks and balances and veto points that made coherent policy action exceedingly difficult, to the point that it led often to outright dysfunction, especially in modern times. The Framers put Congress right at the center of lawmaking, and Congress is right at the center of the dysfunction. As a decision-maker, Congress is just inexcusably bad and utterly incapable of taking effective action on behalf of the nation. Most observers point the finger at polarization, and they say that if we could just move to a more moderate, bipartisan brand of politics, Congress could get back to the good old days when it did a fine job of making public policy, and all would be good. But all would not be good, because the good old days were actually not good. The brute fact is, with some exceptions, like the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and some others, Congress has never, throughout our long history, been capable of crafting effective policy responses to the nation's problems. For documentation, take a look at Peter Schuck's book, Why Government Failed So Often, which provides an encyclopedic source of well-documented evidence on our government's persistent history of ineffective policies. Polarization has made a bad situation worse in recent times, but it is not the underlying cause of Congress's core inadequacies. Those inadequacies are baked into the institution. Congress is an ineffective policymaker because it's wired to be that way by the Constitution, whose design ensures that legislators are electorally tied to their districts and states and highly responsive to the constituencies and special interests that get them reelected. Congress is not wired to solve national problems in the national interest. It's wired to allow hundreds of parochial legislators to promote their own political welfare through special interest politics, and that's what they do. Because of polarization and because of all the veto points and collective action problems, Congress has often been just gridlocked, unable to act at all. But when Congress has been able to act, its lawmaking process has typically led to cobbled together policy concoctions that are crafted on purely political grounds to get disparate legislators representing very different special and local interests on board, not to provide coherent, intellectually well-justified policies that effectively address the nation's problems. The point for them is to patch together something, anything, with enough votes to pass, not to solve problems in the best possible way. So look no further than U.S. tax policy, which is not a policy at all, but a grotesque conglomeration of thousands of special interest favors and loopholes, or witness the ways in which insurance companies, hospitals, drug companies and other vested interests profoundly shaped the Affordable Care Act, turning it into something that no one would have designed that way if they wanted a cost-efficient, well-working system. This approach to governments may have been fine for the late 1700s, but that era is long gone and it's not coming back. What we need is a government that is up to the enormous challenges thrust upon it by the modern world. What we have is a government designed for a primitive world, nothing like our own. It shouldn't come as a shock that this antiquated government, which was not designed for our world, is simply ill-equipped to deal with it and does a bad job. So what can we do? Well, the U.S. is clearly not going to shift to some other form of government or even embrace radical changes of the government that we have. That being so, a practical strategy is to pursue smaller changes that leave our system pretty much as it is but promise big payoffs for effective government. So here's one approach that we think makes good sense. With Congress, the prime source of dysfunction, we should move Congress and all its pathologies from the very center of the legislative process, and we should extend a much more central role to presidents. Why presidents? Because they're wiring a very different from Congresses and actually propels them to be the champions of effective government. Historically, Trump aside, this has been true regardless of whether presidents or liberals are conservatives, Democrats or Republicans, seekers of big government or small government. Unlike most legislators, excuse me, presidents think in national terms about national problems and their overriding concern for their historical legacies for being great drives them to seek durable solutions to pressing national problems. Needless to say, presidents aren't always successful or right, and conservative presidents would seek very different policy solutions than liberal presidents. But all presidents aspire to be the nation's problem solvers and chiefs. And if control of legislation can be shifted partly, not wholly, partly in their direction and away from Congress, the prospects for effective government will be much improved. A simple way to do this is through legislation or constitutional amendment, if that were possible, although legislation could do it, that grants president fast track authority in the lawmaking process. The U.S. has more than 45 years of positive experience with fast track authority and international trade. We've been doing it for decades, going all the way back to the trade act of 1974. That same model would simply be applied to all legislation or barring that to as many important types of issues as possible, including nominations. Under fast track, presidents would craft policy proposals, which are likely to be far more coherent, well integrated, intellectually well justified, and effective than anything Congress would typically come up with. Congress would then be required to vote up or down on those policy proposals without changing them. And it would be required to vote within a specified period of time, say 90 days, and on a majoritarian basis. So there could be no delays. There could be no filibusters and no amendments filling the legislation with new earmarks, loopholes, and special interest provisions. Even with fast track in place, though, Congress would still retain the authority to pass laws on its own if it wanted to. And presidents would still retain the authority to veto those laws. All right. So critics might say that fast track would make the president a dictator. Well, it wouldn't. Both houses of Congress would still need to give their separate consent before any proposal becomes law. Policy would be a three-way decision, not a presidential decision. And the court system and separation of powers would remain intact along with the bill of rights. Moreover, to ensure passage of its policy proposals, presidents would have strong incentives to get lots of input from members of Congress while working up a bill and to engage in whatever compromises are needed in order to gain sufficient support. In addition, Congress could send the proposals out to its committees to get opinion and advice. So again, presidents would hardly be a dictator. I should add that in giving presidents new agenda powers, so if these are, fast track only deals with legislation. It adds nothing to the president's unilateral powers, which are the powers that we really need to fear. Indeed, a big reason presidents have favored executive orders and other unilateral actions is that with Congress such a disaster, the legislative process is all but unavailable for solving problems. Under fast track, presidents would seek out legislation more and unilateral action less. And this would be a big plus for our democracy. Consider immigration, for example. President Bush submitted immigration reforms to Congress in 2005 and 2006. And President Obama submitted another in 2013. All of these bills had majority support in Congress. The votes were clearly there. Yet the first two lost on filibusters in the Senate. And the third failed because Speaker John Boehner refused to even bring it up for a vote in the House. The result, no reform, a festering immigration problem and executive actions by Obama on DACA and other shifts in policy that have caused much consternation on the political right. With fast track, the nation would have passed a comprehensive bipartisan immigration law many years ago. And there would have been less reason or no reason for Obama to take executive action. Now consider a very different example. Suppose fast track were applied as we think it should be to all nominations. Obviously we need these key positions to be filled and quickly in government agencies and in the courts if our government is to do its work and do it well. For decades, however, we've had a very serious problem with presidential nominations being endlessly delayed in the Senate and many are never acted upon. Under fast track, every nomination would receive a majority rule vote by the Senate up or down within 90 days. There would be no delays and no strategy of delay. The most reasonable expectation is the great majority of these nominations would just go through and the courts and agencies would be more quickly and fully staffed and better able to do their jobs. So look, there's much more to say, of course, but here's the bottom line. In the United States, the most fundamental challenge we face is that our government is profoundly ineffective. When problems don't get solved, our society suffers from poor health, care, from rising sea levels, from decaying communities, from crumbling infrastructure, from out of control immigration and more, deeply affecting our quality of life. But that's not all. Because when a democratic government can't meet the needs of its people, the people become alienated, angry and anti-system as tens of millions of Americans are and have been for some years now, their political power is very real and it threatens to bring our democracy down. This is not an academic matter. We need to do something. We need to make our government more effective so that it can meet the needs of its people. This doesn't require, I should emphasize, a term to big bureaucratic top-down government. Some progressives, of course, may choose exactly that path, but conservatives can pursue effective government by embracing policy approach, which is that, through well-crafted governmental design, harness the power of markets and incentives to address the nation's most pressing problems. Carbon taxes, for example, to deal with pollution and climate change, or market-based solutions to provide affordable healthcare or rebuild rural communities. Whatever the approach, we all have a stake in creating a government that works and in saving our democracy. Fast track is one step in the right direction. It's a small, familiar, well-tested, non-threatening reform that stands to have major payoffs. It's the mouse that roars. It would help to streamline a grossly unworkable legislative process and giving us a government that, through lawmaking, not unilateral action, lawmaking, can deal more effectively with the modern world and do a better job meeting the needs of our citizens. If we don't take action to give Americans a better government, we're headed for a train wreck. Our democracy really is on the line. We do need to do something, and fast track is a safe, reasonable reform that deserves our support. Thank you. Thank you, Terry Mow. And now taking the negative on that resolution, 17 and a half minutes for you, Gene Healy. Take it away, Gene Healy. Okay. Thank you. Thanks, my fellow Gene. And thanks to all of you for tuning in tonight. St. Patrick's Day isn't what it used to be now that we're in the era of social distancing, but hopefully this will be more nutritious than guzzling green beer, and you'll probably feel better in the morning. I have to admit, it is difficult for me to imagine gazing out at the hellscape of American politics and saying to myself, you know what this country needs? It's a good dose of presidential empowerment. After all, what we already called the most powerful office in the world has become dramatically more powerful in recent decades. You know, you look at the dragnet secret surveillance programs, global drone warfare, and the pen and phone governance of the Bush Obama years. And then you look at the new weapons that Donald Trump has added to the presidential arsenal, like the ability to use national emergency declarations to do an end run around Congress in a budget fight, or the notion that you can order up drone strikes on senior government figures of countries that we're not legally at war with. The whole experience has been exhausting and frequently terrifying, what with the president threatening war crimes over Twitter and even on one occasion getting into this weird Freudian spat with Kim Jong-un over the size of his, well, it went like this, quote, I too have a nuclear button, but it is a much bigger and more powerful one than Kim's, and my button works. All in all, the Trump years really should have served as sort of a scared straight program for well-meaning progressives who get dewy-eyed about the promise of presidential activism. But it's like the chain gang warden says to Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, some men you just can't reach. Professor Mo tells us in his book that it's important not to be fixated on Trump and the fear of presidential power. He laments that the Trump presidency has actually scared many people into thinking that the presidency needs to be straight jacketed, which is an interesting choice of metaphor given the multiple times over the past four years when we had had to genuinely wonder whether we'd hand it over the machinery of federal law enforcement and the nuclear codes to a nutcase. Still, he says if we bind POTUS down too much, we'll miss out on the enormous promise that presidents can offer as champions of effective government. And the proposed constitutional amendment, it's in the book, it's offered as a constitutional amendment. Perhaps some parts of it could be done legislatively, but in both Relic and the newer book, they talk about an article five convention in order to get this done. The fast-track proposal is supposed to help realize this promise of the presidency. Under it, as he told you, the president writes his preferred bill. He gets a fast-track vote on that bill. And congressmen can either rubber stamp it or essentially veto it. They don't get to get their grubby little thumb prints all over it. Well, in the interests of a lively debate, I really ought to be telling you that this, I'm going to call it the Mo amendment, is a doomsday device that if activated will lay waste to our Republican form of government. It will all be left to scrabble across the post-apocalyptic wasteland searching for bullets and toilet paper. But I'm not going to do that because I really don't think that it wouldn't be honest. The fact is that the proposal doesn't absolutely scare the hell out of me in every respect. I think what he just said about it doesn't make the president a dictator. I think that's largely accurate. So I don't want to paint a darker picture than I have to. I just think it's a lousy idea. I can imagine circumstances in which it's potentially quite dangerous. I think that in the best case, it rests on a sunny, almost Panglossian picture of presidential motivations. And I think that in the unlikely event of its implementation, it would probably make some of the problems he talks about, partisan animosity and tribalism, a good deal works. Let's start with where I can picture it going very raw. In chapter four of the latest book, the authors tell us that one of the problems that it will help ameliorate is the irresponsible way that we tend to drift into war these days. If the Moe Amendment was in Moe Howell Amendment, if you like, was enforced, then when the president wants to take military action, he can put his preferred war authorization in front of Congress and force them to stand to be counted. I think the good thing if Congress was forced to stand to be counted in military matters far more often. But most of you are probably familiar with the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, that Congress passed three days after 9-11. It gave the president the power to, quote, use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons. He determines planned, authorized, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001. In other words, go get the guys who did 9-11 and anyone connected with them. Three presidents in a row have stretched that law into an all-purpose justification for two decades of low-level war in at least half a dozen countries at any given time. And that's entirely Congress's fault, according to Moe and Howell. They write that the language could not have been broader. Well, of course it could, and it would have if this amendment had been in place. Here, for example, is some broader language. The president is authorized to use military force to deter and preempt any future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United States. That's the language the Bush administration put on the table in negotiations with Congress right after 9-11. And talk about a blank check, preempt any future acts of aggression. This draft AUMF that the Bush team put together would have been a license for any future president to unleash fire and fury against North Korea, Iran, or basically any country that the president decides is looking at us funny. But if President Bush had had the power three days after 9-11 to force an up or down vote on that language, do you really think that Congress would have voted it down with ground zero still smoldering? I don't. Perhaps I'm concentrating too much on the fear side of the equation, but there's also the promise side of the equation, the promise of presidential power. That idea is, as Professor Moe just unveiled to you, it's rooted in the theory that the presidents and Congress critters are wired differently, thanks to the nature of their respective offices. The president is elected by the whole country, means he has to take a larger view, be more public spirited, look at the national interest as a whole. Congressmen basically just want to bring home the bacon. On top of that, presidents are, he says, are obsessed with their legacies, which is true. They play to the ages, they want future generations to love them. And the part that I quibble with is the idea that solving big national problems is, quote, their ticket to historical adulation, the way in which they become that and the reason that they routinely aspire to be problems, the nation's problem solvers in chief. They alone can fix it. I think this is a bit of a caricature or more than a bit. There's, of course, a wide body of evidence showing that like any swamp dwelling Congress critter, presidents tend to play pork barrel politics with federal aid. They tend to direct it where it helps them politically to swing states in areas where their partisan base is concentrated. Stafford Act in the area of disaster relief gives them a great deal of authority to do that. So does it shock you to hear that disaster declarations, spike in election years and the battleground states tend to get a lot more love? Probably not. Would it scandalize you to learn that presidents well before Donald Trump used their unilateral powers over trade to deliver protectionist payoffs to swing state industries? A good example is in the run up to the 2004 election when George W. Bush hiked steel tariffs screwing consumers nationwide in order to give himself a boost in states like Ohio and West Virginia. That worked. So this vast dichotomy between the parochialism of congressmen and the public spiritedness of presidents I think is exaggerated. And as for this idea that solving big, genuine national problems is the shorefire ticket to the esteem of historians, I have to borrow a Joe Bidenism. Come on, man. You know who is a real problem solver and chief? Jimmy Carter. And don't laugh. Jimmy Carter bit the bullet on inflation, putting Paul Volcker in at the Fed. He led a wave of transportation deregulation that made air travel accessible to average Americans and made shipping cheaper, faster, enabled just-in-time inventory. When you think about these pampered yuppies, really have Jimmy Carter to thank every time UPS drops off a peloton bike or a pandemic care package with sourdough starter. But do they thank him? No, of course not. All Americans can remember about the Carter presidency is the misery index, the hostage crisis, and that stupid cardigan sweater. Jimmy doesn't get any historical adulation either from having been a good problem solver. The scholars who ranked the presidents make him one of history's losers. He's a bottom half of the class, number 26 on average, just ahead of Richard Nixon, behind the so-called great presidents like Woodrow Wilson and took us into an unnecessary war and mounted one of the worst civil liberties crackdowns in US history. And James K. Polk, who according to the most recent C-SPAN presidential historian survey, quote, ranks highly for his crisis leadership, which is one way of, one way that you could describe Ginny up a war with Mexico to steal California. Five minutes, five minutes. Oh, God, I gotta speed up then. Maybe Jimmy Carter should have started a war. It turns out to be a, in a regression analysis published by David Henderson, a fairly strong correlation between combat deaths under US presidents and their historical ranking. None of what you learn about how legacies are graded is really going to incentivize a president to say get out ahead of the threat of antibiotic resistance or stand up a good asteroid defense. Moreover, the fast track amendment is supposed to be a firebreak against the menacing rise of populism. We've got, as he told you, a paralyzed government overburden with veto points. And it's this ineffectiveness that gave rise to Donald Trump in the first place. Is it, or does this smack a little bit of what the psychologists call projection? It's not as if the 21st century has been one long woeful tale of government paralysis. We have a number of examples where Congress and the president got together to get the big things done in accordance with the president's vision. The war is in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, after the financial collapse at the end of that decade, stimulus package in the TARP bailout plan. You'll notice that a lot of these big ticket items feature heavily in populist complaints. Before the Tea Party drifted Trump word, it got started as a populist backlash against bank bailouts. With the exception of immigration policy, for the most part, actual populists aren't complaining that elites sit there paralyzed while national crises worsen. They're mad about what those morons did. It is also a little strange to want to cool populist tempers with a proposal modeled on the fast-track process that gave us NAFTA and the WTO. Like Professor Mow, I happen to think globalization has been on balance and enormous boon, but nationalist conservatives loathe these fast-track trade agreements and blame them for screwing the American worker and causing deaths of despair. Professor Mow says they're at least partly right. Finally, in the unlikely event that we had an Article 5 convention, which we've never done in our history, and this amendment emerged from the process and got ratified, my strong suspicion is it would make the problem of red, blue tribalism even worse. One of the reasons the presidency has been one of our biggest fault lines of polarization is the fact that the president increasingly has power to reshape vast swaths of American life, shape what our health insurance covers, what sports your kids can play, whether or not you're on the hook for your student loans. He has the power to launch a trade war from his couch or stumble into a shooting war in the Middle East. You can bet when the states are that high we're going to fight about it bitterly. The Mow amendment, with its new agenda setting powers for the president, raises the states even higher. It makes the presidency an even bigger prize in a zero-sum winner-take-all partisan death match. And if what we're worried about is the rise of populist demagogues, we should be heading in the opposite direction, working to limit the damage that they can do when they take office, reigning in emergency powers, war powers, trade authorities, pen in the phone. What we should be aiming at is making the president safe from populism and safe for democracy. None of that is easy to do, but none of it requires a constitutional amendment. And none of it presents the risks entailed in Professor Mow's proposal. Just say no to his amendment. Thank you. Thank you, Gene. Terry, I guess you don't mind it being called the Mow amendment. And Terry, Terry Mow, you've got, we're keeping to the length and schedule. Indeed, you have five minutes for rebuttal. Take it away, Terry. Well, from my standpoint, it's as though Gene just took a giant slate of linguiney and threw it against the wall, you know? I mean, to see what would stick. There wasn't, from my standpoint, in the coherent, logically linear kind of argument being made here, there were just a bunch of different points being made that weren't entirely connected to one another. So dealing with that kind of melange is not so easy. So look, let me just make a couple of points here. One is that it's important to think about both the promise and the fear of presidential leadership and presidential power. And the fact is that presidents have great promise in promoting effective government because we have a government that doesn't work. It's all divided up. It's all fragmented. And Congress, at the center, is filled with 535 people running in different directions and responding to different interests. The thing is a mess. It's an institutional travesty. And so we need a president to provide guidance and leadership. And it's our only hope for effective government. So the idea that, okay, Trump was president, Trump was scary, you know, acting unilaterally, undermining the rule of law, attacking our democratic institutions, and much worse for four years. And so people here, well, we should give presidents this additional power or authority in fast-track. People hear that and they go, are you kidding? You know what we have to do is we, the lesson of the Trump years is tie presidents up and not. That's what we have to do. Okay, you tie presidents up and not. And then our government will be even less efficient. Right? We need an effective government. And then we can't get it if we tie presidents up and not. Okay? So we have to then recognize that there's two sides of this. The other side is the fear side. We have reason to fear presidential power. But what we can do is constrain presidents in other ways. Right? We can have a fast-track model of decision-making that empowers presidents to make the government more effective and takes advantage of that aspect of what presidents have to offer. But then we can also, say, insulate the Department of Justice and the intelligence agencies from direct presidential control by various means. Trump came very close to using those powerful agencies in very, very dangerous ways. We can take steps to drastically limit the number of presidential appointees. We can eliminate through constitutional amendment the pardon power. There's never any justification for that thing. We can pass legislation that does away with conflicts of interest by presidents. The laws we have now are travesty. We can pass legislation that really restricts the president's ability to use national emergency to take unilateral actions and so on. So we can constrain presidents and protect ourselves. But at the same time, we can empower presidents in the legislative process to make the legislative process, which is a travesty, work better. So that's the logic of that. Just the thing about legacy. I think presidents are obviously motivated by legacy. They all want to be great. They think about it all the time. And this drives them to want to do good things for the country. That's a very good thing. And this article about what Gene was saying about Jimmy Carter just doesn't ring true. I mean, Jimmy Carter did actually a lot of good things for this country. But he was burdened by a terrible economy, one of the worst ever in this country, with huge unemployment and through the roof inflation. And then the Iranians took our hostages. Okay, he was done. And that was part of his legacy too. So it's not as though he didn't accomplish things. And it's also not that he wasn't trying because he was. And the important thing is that all presidents want to try hard to achieve important things for the country. And that makes them different from Congress because they're thinking about cotton and soybeans. And they're not thinking about the kinds of things that presidents are thinking about. Perfect timing. Five minutes now. Five minutes of linguine from you, Gene. Well, I think in the the the linguine storm, Professor Mo completely missed my point about Jimmy Carter or couldn't believe that I wasn't being sarcastic. In fact, Jimmy Carter was a problem solver. I think he did great things in deregulating the transport sector. I think he, I think Ronald Reagan gets a good bit of the credit for some of the deregulation that happened under Jimmy Carter. I do think that it would be without the wave of reform that he initially initiated without the problem that he very much helped solve. I think that I think it would be the few parts of American society that worked well in this pandemic, including fast shipping of various goods would not have been possible. So I was not joking about Carter. The man solved a couple of problems and gets no appreciation from the people who fill out presidential scorecards for it. If you look at the presidential scorecards, you will find that in the bottom 10, there are no work presidents. The top 10 are larded with them. And in no way would it is absolutely true that presidents care about their legacies. But what the people who are filling out the report cards are telling them is that being an imperial president who makes a lot of noise breaks things and does does big things is certainly much more important than the slow boring of hard boards and solving genuine national problems. That's my point. It's a bit of a romanticized view of how presidents are motivated. Bill Clinton used to complain to Dick Morris about how hard it was being president when we didn't have an enemy to fight. He used to say I envy JFK having an enemy that you can get people to do what do things when they're not threatened is harder. I don't know what else I have. I think the proposal would make some things worse, a few minor things better and mostly exacerbate the very problems that Howell and Moe identify. All right. You took just less than three minutes of your time, Gene. And that can't be gotten back. That's lost forever. We now turn to the Q&A portion of the evening. And we give an opportunity to Gene Healy to ask a question of Terry Moe. Terry Moe, the opportunity to ask a question of Gene Healy. Gene, first of all, do you want to exercise that option at this moment? You can exercise it later if you want. One of the intriguing things I thought about the book and one of the things that made me think about the proposal a little more is I do think it's true that gridlock, while it's not an argument for more presidential power, it certainly drives presidents to strike out on their own. I think that's exactly what happened with the Obama directives implementing large parts of the DREAM Act. But under this proposal, don't you give everyone two bites at the apple? For example, like, so if a president, the president can go the fast track route, he can put a legislative proposal on the table. And if it, you know, if it passes good, we're all united behind it. If it fails, though, he's in a worse position for unilateral action, because now he is in the, for the executive power logics, he's in, he's not no longer in the Jackson zone of twilight, he's, Congress has considered this, voted it down. So he's taken the ability to do it unilaterally under current doctrine off the table. Why wouldn't the president just, so if Joe Biden decides that he agrees with the Elizabeth Warren's idea that he can just forgive up to $50,000 in student loan debt per person, he would only put that on the table, right? If he, if he thought he was going to win the vote, right? Otherwise, he would just do it unilaterally. And there would be no argument. His argument would be just as good as it was before this amendment passed. So why doesn't this just add more gamesmanship to, and more diffusion of responsibility to an already diffused and frustrating process? There's always going to be gamesmanship, right? You know that. And I think presidents are going to have to figure out what their options are and make their moves accordingly. So they're going to do the best they can to get proposals through Congress by mobilizing support as best they can within Congress because legislation is better than an executive order. It's permanent, right? And they would rather do that than issue an executive order, right? I think you're right. They don't want to initiate legislation and then have Congress voted down, right? But they're not stupid, right? So they can look ahead, they can count noses, and they just have to figure out what they're going to go with and what they're not going to go with. But FastTrack gives them legislative options that they don't have now. It gives them opportunities to make public policy by passing legislation. And I think one of the things that has really made our democracy so difficult over the past number of decades is that the legislative process doesn't work. And presidents can't rely on it. And so they have to issue these executive orders. You know, they're a pale reflection of real legislation. You know, it's not optimal for the system as a whole. We don't want that. We want legislation. But legislation can't happen most of the time, right? So what I would do is just turn this back and say, look, man, if you don't have FastTrack, what do you have? Just the system as it exists? Then what? Are you happy with that? All right. Look, I don't have a five-point plan to solve executive, to solve, to deliver effective government in the areas where I think effective government is needed. I don't have to be able to conclude that your plan doesn't really do it. I think, look, I agree that I think presidents should get an up or down vote on all judicial nominations, certainly all executive branch nominations. I think we're going to get closer to that. I don't know why I should conclude from that, that the president should get to write his own war authorizations and ram them through Congress that can either rubber stamp them or send them back in a crisis atmosphere. I don't see that as making any huge improvements on what we've got now. I also, furthermore, don't see many of the large 21st century initiatives where Congress and the president moved in lockstep and that have been disasters. I don't really see that they've been, maybe Obamacare might be, you may have a point there, but most of them, I don't see it as congressional parochialism screwing up the president's public-spirited vision. I think people got together and did stupid things in a big way and I'm not sure I want to grease the tracks for more of that to happen. I have a question for you, Terry. Gene Healy said that the fast track might be better in minor ways. On your side, do you see how fast track authority may be worse in minor ways? If so, could you address the minor ways in which it might make matters worse or do you see no potential to make matters worse in any way? Take it away, Terry. Do you have an answer to that question? Yeah, my answer is no. I don't see any ways in which the fast track would be worse than what we have now. What we have now is a process that simply doesn't work. Gene Healy, then on your side, you said it could be better in minor ways, so why don't you speak on behalf of it in minor ways, at least for a minute or two, and what way it would be better? Sure. I will say that I led before the linguine onslaught with a big example in the 2001 AUMF and the original Bush administration language in which it could have been worse in a major way. But no, as I said, I think Merrick Garland should have gotten an up or down vote. I don't think, I don't care which party is doing it, I think the president, when he's trying to staff an administration, should get an up or down vote, and I also think Terry is right. Years ago, I probably would have said all gridlock is good. But I think Terry is right that it incentivizes presidents who have, there's a lot of play in the joints, a lot of unilateral power they can claim. There's a lot of flexibility in statutes because Congress writes them so broadly that it doesn't end with gridlock. So I think Barack Obama was reluctantly driven into making immigration policy with the stroke of a pen, which is not ideal. And I think that Joe Biden will be under similar pressures in a 50-50 Senate. So I do think something that, you know, I don't think it's the case that gridlock is always good. And I think that there is a case to be made that something along the lines of what Mo and Hal propose, some elements of it, would cut down on that incentive for the president to strike out on his own and just make law by executive fiat. I don't think it would solve most of the problems, however. Do you want to come in on that, Terry, or should we get the next question? Yeah. Well, I do think that we need to be comparing these discussions about possible reforms with the status quo. The status quo is a complete institutional mess. And we are in a society that is filled with very, very debilitating consequential problems that are burying people and are making people really angry and really disaffected from our country and from our democracy. And while people sit here twiddling their thumbs and sort of glorifying our constitutional system and glorifying Congress as though, gee, you know, if Congress could just get it together, you know, and if they could just act in a bipartisan way, we'd be able to fix these things. And all of that is wrong. You know, it's the whole institutional system that doesn't work. And meantime, we're going down. This is a very serious crisis of democracy that we're in right now, even though Trump is out of office. It was worse when Trump was in office. If he had won a second term, I have little doubt we would have gone down. Would you want him to have the fast track amendment if he had won a second term? I think in general, we should have fast track. Just like I think in general, there should be no filibuster. No, I think we need to take this system, which has so many obstacles to action and get rid of most of those obstacles and have a much more majoritarian democratic system so that elections matter. Right. And so this is not a Republican or Democratic thing. Sort of ingenious thought on the part of a person in the chat room, implying that maybe this whole idea could be neutralized, which reads, couldn't Congress simply vote down the president's fast track bill and then propose their own version, who the normal legislative process? Why went that blunt, the worst of Gene Healy's concerns about increased presidential power? Or actually, of course, on Terry Moe's side, if Congress did that as a matter of course, every time the president comes up with a fast track bill, they just voted down and write their own, if they're depending on who's in charge, wouldn't that sort of blunt Terry's idea to begin with? But Gene Healy, do you want to address that particular idea, that scenario? And then I'll give it to Terry. Yeah, that's another thing that it's a good question. It's another thing that occurred to me as I was reading the book. I went back and forth between would this be a disaster? Would it not matter at all? And I think I came at it as it would matter in certain circumstances, particularly under periods of unified government, particularly during crisis, you know, post Pearl Harbor, post 9-11 moments, I think it'd be especially dangerous. But yeah, so in an earlier question, I thought I suggested that the president can have his choice as to if I think I can win the vote, if I got the right whip count, then I can do this legislatively, and it'll have more staying power. Certainly Obama would have preferred to do that with immigration reform. But on the flip side, yeah, as the questioner points out, you know, Congress, if it's not a crisis situation, might be able to, if they're not lockstep with the president, they're not co-partisans, it's divided government, put in all their parochial sausage pieces that they wanted anyway, you know, by just voting down the president's bill and, you know, passing their own bill. I think, you know, I think that's a possibility for sure. Maybe Terry has an answer to that. Terry Moe, do you want to address that question and Gene Hillie's answer? Terry? Look, in the limits, it's feasible that Congress could just vote no, right? Like every time the president proposes something, Congress could vote no. And then Congress could go back and devise its own legislation, right, instead, which the president could of course veto, right? So that could happen. But I think the immigration examples I just gave are good ones, right? So here you have these incendiary issues. And nonetheless, they were able to come up with these packages that had enough votes to pass in both the House and the Senate, thanks to votes by Democrats and Republicans, but the leadership wouldn't allow them to pass. So they died, two of them on filibusters in the Senate, one of them because John Boehner wouldn't even let people vote on them in the House. If you took away that agenda control, we would have had immigration, a new immigration law, right? And that kind of thing can happen a lot. And anybody in political science who studies agenda control will tell you that the agenda controller has a great deal of control in crafting proposals that will win support from a legislative body. Now, that doesn't mean that they're always going to be successful, but the agenda control is in a real position of power because they're able to manipulate the elements of the proposal, taking into account what kind of support they can get from different alternatives so that they can come up with one with sufficient support to pass, right? So this idea, oh, hey, Congress could just vote no all the time, okay, that's not what you would expect based on hundreds of studies that have been based on exactly this kind of situation. Jerry Moe, I'm getting a number of questions and concerns about an issue that Gene Healy did raise having to do with war powers of the presidency. And a few of them have picked up on Gene Healy's concern that had there been fast track in 01, a very broad language that the Bush administration wanted to apply could have been voted by Congress and there might have been hell to pay arguably. Are you concerned more broadly in any way about the war powers of the presidency now? Do you see any way in which fast track might worsen that situation? Is there anything that you want to say addressing that concern? Well, two things. One, in my view, fast track can be applied to some issues and not others. Right? I mean, in the limit, they could be applied to all issues. That doesn't have to be the case. Secondly, presidents are almost unconstrained in exercising war powers. Right? I mean, I don't like that, but I think that they are highly unconstrained. And George Bush was, you know, in starting those wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq, you know, and they go through the motions of, you know, consulting and taking boats and stuff like that. But basically, the president is the man, you know, and that's that's what the theory of the Unitary Executive is all about. And that's why the Office of Legal Counsel is staffed by these people who believe in the theory of the Unitary Executive because they come up with legal justifications for why the president can do whatever he wants to do. So in my view, it's important for those kinds of things to change. And so for me, this is not really a fast track issue. So much of it is an issue of the president's unilateral powers in foreign affairs and national security, because I think they go well beyond what is good for a democracy, a well functioning democracy. Yeah. Well, the question also picked up on the very point about legacy, which was Gene Hilli's point that that president seemed to be ranked high if they fought wars. And but then you're saying that you share that concern, and you're saying then that you would do something about it. Is there something that you would do about it that you'd like to put forward? You know, this brings up constitutional issues that haven't been resolved, right? Like the War Powers Act was, I think, a good idea. But it's also an idea that every president has declared unconstitutional, and it's never been resolved by the Supreme Court, right? So this was an attempt to reign in presidents. And I think Congress needs to get more serious about reining presidents in when it comes to going to war. It's like they just have to say, look, we've had it, you know, and we need to take steps that will actually constrain presidents when it comes to war making powers. So then you run into the Supreme Court, right? Because it's unclear where the Supreme Court will stand on this. He's the commander in chief and all the rest. Do you again, to flog you further only because of getting a lot of questions, do you then perceive that if your amendment were passed next week, that it could, in this vacuum that you speak of, worsen the already, as you indicate, sorry situation with respect to presidents bringing us to war? Would it worsen it in any way? Do you have that concern? Well, in principle, it could. But really, again, what's happening is you're streamlining the process so that the president has to take a proposal to the Senate and to the House. And the members of the Senate and the House have to vote. But he doesn't have to in war. Okay. We're talking about fast track here. Right. But okay, tell you tell you finished response for the moment. I was going to give you ample opportunity to address. Oh, sorry. That's okay, Gene. Terry, have you finished your remarks for the moment? I'll just try to clear this up a little bit. Because there are times when presidents go to Congress to get authorization, right, for the things that they're going to do or that they have already started doing, right? And then fast track still requires that the Senate has to vote yes and the House has to vote yes. You know, so those are good things, you know, and their potential constraints on on what presidents can do. But as Gene said, presidents are often doing these things unilaterally, they do them, right? And that's the problem that we all face in having a presidency that would seem to be too powerful and too unilateral when it comes to war making. When you look back and see all the trouble this nation has gotten into because of that. Then taking it to you, Gene Healy, because the narrowly focused question that you could respond to or speak more broadly about is do you see a way in which this enhanced fast track authority could worsen the situation with respect to the president's exercise of war powers? Absolutely. Well, most presidents, which is true that presidents have a largely free hand in military affairs, a de facto if not, you know, by any constitutional metric, but they would in general, since Korea, they've preferred to get Congress on board if they're going to do a large land invasion of a country like Iraq. So that's what, or Afghanistan, that's what you see George W. Bush going for those, going for congressional authorization of some sort in those kinds of situations. That's basically been the war powers dynamic since Korea. I think the fast track proposal gives them in a crisis atmosphere like something like September 11th, the ability to put their preferred language in front of Congress immediately after the fact, rubber stamp it or say no to this injury that's been dealt us. And I think they're in a better position. I think fast track does nothing to change the basic dynamic that we've had since Korea and possibly gives them another tool that in crisis situations could be very dangerous, but they're still going to have the choice as they would with legislation of how do they feel about it? Do I want to use my unilaterally, it does nothing about their unilateral powers. How do I feel about it? Do I want to use my unilateral military powers that I'm claiming or get Congress to buy in? And so I think it does little to get rid of the problem and potentially a lot to make it worse. That concludes the Q&A portion of the evening. We now go to the summations. You will each are going to be given a full seven and a half minutes to summarize and you are the affirmative Terry. So you go first. Take it away Terry. Just to sum up a few things. I didn't write out a formal statement completely, but here are a few basic points that I just want to drive home. We have a government that doesn't work. Now and Congress is at the heart of the dysfunction. It has two houses. It has 535 members. They're tied to different states and districts. And as an institution, it's just filled with veto points and collective action problems that make any sort of action very difficult. And even when it can act, it cobbles together bills that are patchwork creations that are filled with special interest provisions and designed to get enough votes to pass, not to provide coherent, well-justified policies that are finally tuned to actually solve the nation's problems effectively. This is just unacceptable. It really is. The problems that we're facing as a modern nation get more and more complicated and more and more debilitating. And if we can't solve these problems, they're going to tear this society apart and they're also going to convince people that this government doesn't deserve to be supported. So because of our government effectiveness, these problems are destroying our quality of life and this same ineffectiveness is also dangerous for our democracy because the government, they can't meet the needs of its people, gives rise to alienation and anger, to populism, and to a rejection of democracy itself. It's already happening. It's been happening throughout the Trump year. That's what gave rise to the Trump presidency. And it threatens to bring down our democracy. Trump threatened to bring down our democracy. We need to do something. Fast-track is one way of getting to the heart of the matter and trying to make our government work. It's a very conservative reform. You know, it's small. It's well tested for over four decades. Five minutes. And it leaves the rest of the government fully intact. It deserves our support, I think. So Gene has lobbed a number of different points up there. And to me, they don't add up to a coherent whole, a coherent counterargument. You know, he doesn't like Fast-track. But there's not a coherent persuasive argument. Why? So it's a little hard to just pick out specific things and argue against them. So let me try to pick out just a few. So Jimmy Carter, again, Jimmy Carter desperately wanted a strong legacy. He wanted to be regarded as a great president like everybody else. And what Gene points out is that, well, he did really important things, but he didn't get credit for them. And that's true. But so what? You know, what's important here is we want to know what motivates presidents. And especially we want to know what motivates them by comparison to what motivates members of Congress. Members of Congress are not sitting around thinking of how they can come up with solutions to the nation's problems and how to make them the most effective possible. That's not the way members of Congress work. You know, they're thinking about soybeans or something small, something local, something parochial, something that will get them re-elected. Presidents have to be thinking big about these things. That's the big difference between presidents and members of Congress. And that's why we need presidents so much in the legislative process to make the legislative process work. And like with Carter, okay, he did some good things. But in the end, the economy was horrible. The Iranians took our hostages. And that's what mainly determines his legacy. Those things took him down because they were part of his legacy. There were good parts, and there were bad parts, and the bad parts dragged him down. Think about Lyndon Johnson. Gee, what he accomplished, you know, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Medicare, Medicaid, unbelievable, you know, the Great Society programs. But he also got us into Vietnam. Okay, what's his legacy? Well, at the end of the day, people said getting us into Vietnam was so bad that Johnson has a bad legacy, even though his domestic legacy probably went way beyond FDRs. Right? So, legacy is not a simple thing. Presidents are striving for it. Right? And just about killed Lyndon Johnson that he got painted by this Vietnam War. Right? But the important thing from our standpoint is that legacy drives presidents, and legacy gives us a way to understand why presidents do what they do. It gives us a way to help predict their decisions and to know that presidents will behave differently from legislators. And if we want to have an effective government, we're much better off in the hands of presidents than we are in the hands of 535 legislators, right? Who will put together bills that will not solve social problems. One minute. One minute. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Presidents want to solve social problems. We're in better hands with them. And so, that's why this simple shift to fast-track is a reasonable way of trying to move us along this path toward a more effective government while leaving the whole rest of the government the same. Right? So, that's the basic argument. And you can pick a way at it in, you know, complaining about one aspect or another. But I think what it often comes down to is, yeah, well, what are the ideas on the other side? You're going to leave everything the way it is. Good luck with that. What are the other ideas for making the government more effective? Let's hear them. Right? I think fast-track is an excellent idea. It's simple. It's easy to do, and it works. Thank you, Terry. Gene Healy, your summation, seven and a half minutes. Take it away, Gene Healy. With apologies to yes, minister, Terry said we need to do something. Maybe we do. Fast-track is something, but it shouldn't be done. It doesn't respond to any of the problems, most of the problems that he's identified. He, well, let's look at, I thought we would have gotten to this, but I guess we didn't. But as I was preparing for this, I thought about COVID. I mean, it's certainly right. Government is ineffective. The last year or so was a stress test for American, the federal government, and it certainly didn't perform well. You know, we've got a higher death rate than most of Europe. It's amazing to me that we're vaccinating faster than most of Europe, given how horrible and inefficient the vaccination process looks like from the ground level. But how many of our problems with COVID were due to veto points impeding bold legislative action? How many of our problems in the big ticket items that have passed in the 21st century, the Iraq and Afghanistan war authorizations, the bank bailouts and on and on were due to congressional, the problem stem from congressional parochialism and log rolling. Terry doesn't like linguine. He certainly doesn't like watching sausage being made. But in throughout the course of this century, when Congress has done big things, it doesn't seem to me that what spoiled them was congressional parochialism. And during the immediate crisis, there are a lot of veto points. There are a lot of veto players. They're not the ones that Terry talks about, or that his proposal would do anything about. A lot of them in this current crisis were the in the executive branch, the FDA and the CDC holding up early testing, the CDC holding up testing in February of last year, you know, when testing had already been developed in WHO in Germany, not allowing it to be approved because the CDC wanted their own test. You know, we lost two months in the pandemic there. We lost at least a couple of months in vaccine approval with the FDA dragging its feet and not working weekends and not treating this like an emergency situation, even though they eventually gave emergency authorization to a few of the vaccines. There are a lot of veto players and a lot of veto points that contribute to making American government woefully ineffective and may even add to the general ambiance that makes people angry and, you know, willing to be anti-system players. But most of them, as far as I can tell, are not in Congress. I hold no particular brief from Congress other than a constitutional one. Okay. I don't want to be seen as carrying water for Congress other than it's a constitutional role. There was a some years back a bunch of smart ass pollsters did a poll that I quite liked where they asked people to rank Congress against various unpleasant things like, I think it was lice, colonoscopies, and nickel back. And all of these unpleasant things beat Congress. You know, Congress deserves, in many ways, the lack of respect that it gets. But it does not seem to me, other than fairly indirectly, it has been respond, the lack of fast track authority and the filibuster and the power of the House and Senate leadership has been what has made this pandemic such a disaster for Americans. You know, it's executive branch players in the administrative state and in some cases in the state house, governor's office. And so, while I think government should be more effective, I would like government to be more effective in the things that it should legitimately be doing. I see nothing that, in particular, that fast track would do to end this general sense of government ineffectiveness. And I see at least a few things it could do to grease the wheels for more disasters along the lines that we had after 9-11 and during the financial crisis. And well, I guess I'll leave it there. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time. All right. Thank you, Gene Healey. And that concludes our debate. Thank you, Terry. Thank you, Gene. It looks like we got the voting results. In summary, it was pretty close. Again, whoever wins is sort of quote-unquote, wins and gets the Tootsie roll is the one who moves the needle in his favor. The yes vote initially on behalf of the resolution defended by Terry Mow was 4.55 percent. And Terry, you gained 9 percentage points. You moved up to 13.6 percent. A gain of 9 percentage points is the number to beat. Gene Healey's defending the no side went from 63.6 to 77.2, picking up 13.6 points. So 13.6 exceeds the 9 that you gained. Gene, you're looking perplexed. You got 13 percentage points gain. And Terry got a 9 percentage point gain. So you had a 4 percentage point margin of victory. Gene Healey, you get the Tootsie roll. Congratulations to Terry. Congratulations to Gene. Thank you very much for a superb debate. And we hope to see you all soon at the cell phone. Good night.