Congressional-Executive Relations and the Foreign Policy Consensus

When Woodrow Wilson, still in the early years of his academic career, studied the relations between Congress and the Executive, he focussed on organization and channels of leadership and responsibility. He was distressed at the disorderliness of affairs in which Congress had a part, and he was convinced that its noisy and often undignified procedures were an impassable obstacle to good government. He pined for the logic and clearly fixed responsibilities of parliamentary government on the British model of that time, for its party discipline and for the clear-cut choices between alternative policies that it offered to the electorate.For contemporary observers, Congressional-Executive relations still attract attention, particularly in the field of foreign affairs. But the factors which Wilson examined with the greatest care of all seem now to be less central than they were to him. Partly this is because the federal government itself has changed: it now has a vastly wider range of both responsibilities and control than it once had, and there have been shifts in the relative power of the different branches within the government, to which Wilson himself as President contributed much. But there are also other reasons. In an age of ideological extremes, a wider consent than a simple majority seems more desirable than it might have been in Wilson's day, and no one is certain that the parliamentary form is superior in providing for this wider consent.