What's happened? Why is my government such a terrible thing? -- Congressman Henry Hyde, remarks on the House floor, April 2, 1996 From the perspective of Waldonian thought, war against American government challenges public administration to preserve and promote the integrity and capacity of government to pursue the constitutional and policy objectives and values for which it is responsible. To paraphrase James Madison in Federalist Paper 51, provision for defense must be commensurate to the danger of attack. Public administration should not succumb to a failure of nerve or to simplistic, grandiose, and mechanistic schemes of reform in the face of intellectual, political, emotional, and physical assaults. Waldonian thought is a strong provision for defense against the danger of attack and the superficial and mechanistic responses this war invites. In the war over and on government there are assertions, arguments, and actions to the effect that government does not, cannot, or should not carry out its constitutional and policy responsibilities. Differences in values and policy often are expressed as attacks on government. The war on and over government advances distrust of action by government. To use the words of the National Performance Review, government is broke and broken (Gore, 1993). In historical perspective, contemporary warfare on government might prove to be a phase in a modified version of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s interpretation of the cycles of American history (Schlesinger, 1987). In this interpretation the American public alternates between reliance on public and private action to address its concerns. Forms of Warfare The major forms and sources of warfare are constitutional and legal, economic, political, moral, media-exploitative, and nihilistic. The constitutional and legal form may be the least visible but the most important. This form has three levels. At the Supreme Court level, several justices -- in some cases a majority, in some a minority -- question the constitutionality of federal action in various forms. They raise questions that have long seemed settled. Whatever the intent, the effect is to bring into question the legitimacy of various kinds of federal policies and administration. Two cases are illustrative. In U.S. v. Lopez (131 L Ed 2d 626, 1995), five members held that the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 exceeded Congress's authority under the commerce clause, only the second such holding in almost 60 years. In Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida (64 US Law Week 4167, 1996) five members held that Congress lacks power under the Indian commerce clause to abrogate states' Eleventh Amendment immunity from suit in federal court for violations of federally created rights. These cases raise uncertainty for established practices. The second level of legal warfare is a lack of emphasis on the rule of law in public administration (Moe and Gilmour, 1995) The basic documents of the National Performance Review (NPR) barely mention the role of the rule of law and constitutional values in the brave new world of administration the NPR envisions. The NPR ignores the purposes of government expressed in the Preamble to the Constitution, such as a more perfect union, justice, the general welfare, and liberty. It ignores such central values as due process and equal protection in administration. The NPR defines administration as pursuit of results -- excluding from its concept of results the realization of the fundamental values upon which the nation was founded, and upon which the legitimacy of government and public administration rests (Rohr, 1986). The third level of legal warfare is carelessness about or indifference to law, or worse, in the behavior of both political and career administrators. Whatever the merits or demerits of the behavior of government officials in the Ruby Ridge and Waco incidents, the record indicates an indifference to legal requirements and values in official reports and explanations of these events (Stern, 1996). …
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Nov 17, 2023
Howard Zwickel + 1
Open Access
