Presidents normally needed and enjoyed some support from the opposing party
for their majorities in Congress. The coordinating institution, then as now, was
presidential leadership, not party government.
- 6 Constitutions Make a Difference
The key to this diVerence is constitutional. Party organization and class structure
were contributing causes, but the heart of the matter was the American separation
of powers in contrast with the fusion of powers in Britain. Under the British
constitution, the cabinet exercised not only the executive power of directing the
various departments of the state, but also the legislative power of deciding what
laws would be passed and what taxes levied. Therefore, when the Queen read the
prime minister’s annual announcement of what laws his government proposed to
adopt, you knew that would happen. Compare those virtual certainties with the
mere probabilities of what a president proposes in his State of the Union address.
To be sure, in Britain as in the USA, bills become laws only if passed by the
legislature. That enactment required the assent of the monarch, still expressed in
the old Anglo-Norman imperative,la reine le veult, which has not been refused
since Queen Anne’s days. The monarch had the legal right to refuse consent, but by
long-established convention her consent, in eVect, was a power of the cabinet.
What the parliament may enact, moreover, had no legal limit. The Crown in
Parliament was still legally as sovereign as proclaimed in the celebrated declarations
of Coke and Blackstone. Thanks, however, to the fusion of powers in the cabinet,
which included what laws would be made, it was in that body that this great power
of ultimate legal sovereignty actually resided.
To be sure, the House of Commons could dismiss the cabinet by withdrawing its
conWdence. In this manner the House could deprive one cabinet of the power to
govern, but only in order to install another in its place. The House decided who
governs, but it did not itself govern. The legislature could change one monopolist
of power for another, thereby eVecting the wishes of the democratic electorate, but
it did not itself resume that power by turning over the business of law-making to
individuals or committees, except, you might wish to say, for that dominant
committee, which thereby became the executive.
This plural executive, the cabinet, was bound to act as a unit by the constitu-
tional convention of collective responsibility. This meant that every member of the
cabinet must comply with and, if necessary, defend in public the decisions of the
cabinet, even if he disliked them and had opposed them in cabinet discussions. The
cabinet, however, could not satisfy this norm independently of the prime minister.
He determined the agenda for cabinet discussion and his summations gave the
government machine its principal marching orders. He appointed and dismissed
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