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.
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, they also did not “foresee that members of Congress and perhaps members of the judicial branch, too, would refuse to check the power of a president from their own party.”
Pointing to Trump’s two impeachments, Kagan suggests that “party loyalty has superseded branch loyalty, and never more so than in the Trump era.” Republican “members of Congress are willing to defend or ignore the president’s actions simply because he is their party leader.” This, Kagan says, renders impeachment and conviction virtually a dead letter.
There are, of course, other brakes on the tendency of one-party rule to subvert the system of separation of powers and checks and balances. One of the most important is the impact of intra-party conflict within the majority party. Law professor Gregory Elinson observes that “intraparty conflict can immunize our constitutional system from the pathologies that arise when partisan warfare is overlayed on the Madisonian model of separated institutions sharing power... Today, as was true at the Founding, Americans have no great love for intraparty conflict or party factionalism.”
Elinson suggests that Americans “have failed to understand that the relative porousness of our parties—the very feature that drives internal party conflict—has helped to safeguard our republic…”
But, in recent years, such intraparty conflict has diminished significantly, at least as reflected in the way members of Congress vote on legislation. In 2022, The Pew Research Center found that “Both parties have grown more ideologically cohesive. There are now only about two dozen moderate Democrats and Republicans left on Capitol Hill, versus more than 160 in 1971-72. Both parties have moved further away from the ideological center since the early 1970s. Democrats on average have become somewhat more liberal, while Republicans on average have become much more conservative.”
Thus, it is not surprising that, as David Davenport says, “party-line voting has become the new normal. As recently as the early 1970s, party unity voting was around 60%, but today it is closer to 90% in both the House and Senate.” That continued during Trump’s first term when every Republican but one voted to support the president’s position on legislation between 80 and 100% of the time.
From 2017-2021, when Democrats controlled at least one chamber of Congress, Trump and members of his administration regularly defied congressional subpoenas. As Trump said in 2019, “We’re fighting all the subpoenas.”
While in the White House, Trump tried to block multiple congressional investigations, and Republicans in the House and the Senate acquiesced without protest. Madison would have been dismayed by their failure to display branch loyalty.
It looks like Republicans in Congress will do no better in the face of a second Trump administration. The clearest example of Trump’s demand that Republicans in Congress toe the line and of their willingness to do so came when the president-elect posted the following on Truth Social: “Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments (in the Senate!), without which we will not be able to get people confirmed in a timely manner…Sometimes the votes can take two years, or more. This is what they did four years ago, and we cannot let it happen again. We need positions filled IMMEDIATELY!”
The response from three senators seeking the position of Senate Majority Leader would have been yet another grave disappointment to Madison. One of them, Florida Sen. Rick Scott, quickly endorsed Trump’s demand that the Senate waive one of its key prerogatives: “100% agree. I will do whatever it takes to get your nominations through as quickly as possible.” The other two, Texas Senator John Cornyn and the eventual winner, South Dakota’s John Thune, also agreed that Trump should have that power and use it if he wants.
The question of whether one-party rule can be reconciled with the Founders’ vision of constitutional government will face another test if the president-elect successfully presses the Congress to recess so he can appoint to his Cabinet people about whom even many Republican senators have grave reservations. And, as Trump’s second term proceeds, what, if any, oversight will the House or the Senate do? How will Republican majorities in Congress respond to instances of corruption if and as they occur in the administration?
The early signs are not good.
In the end, one-party rule is fine so long as the dominant party does what Madison expected. They must carefully guard and exercise what he called “the constitutional rights“ of the institutions where their members serve, even if it means defying the wishes of a president from their party.
