MYSTICAL CODSWALLOP.

Jonah Goldberg questions the idea of elective mandates.

Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson—presidents I respectively revere and despise—furthered this conception of the president as an avatar of the national will. Most famously in his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln elevated the logic and language of the Declaration of Independence to justify a Union victory and the emancipation of the slaves and to enshrine equality before the law as central to America’s purpose. Wilson just wanted to wield as much unchecked power as possible.

Proponents of the idea that the president is the singular instrument of the “will of the people”—sometimes called the “plebiscitary mandate”—typically insinuate that presidents outrank Congress because they have the backing of a national majority while legislators wield only narrow, sectarian mandates from their districts or states.

That "national majority" is dubious, more often than when a president's electoral vote total is a popular vote anomaly, as even in presidential landslide years, the winner has not garnered a majority of eligible voters. When your claim to office is an artifact of who doesn't show up, perhaps it is wise to be modest.  Unfortunately, the way to cast the presidential mandate into doubt might not please anybody.  "[Y]ou can be sure that if he is elected, many Republicans will claim [Donald Trump] has a mandate to do exactly that. Perhaps that would help progressives who love the idea of presidential mandates—when they win—see the problem with them."

Although Mr Goldberg concentrates on presidential mandates, a passage in his essay leaves a question unanswered.  "Congressional majorities—and hence congressional mandates—form around specific issues and interests as a result of deliberation and compromise. Or at least they do when Congress works."  That formulation leaves out Franklin Roosevelt's 1932 Congress, and Lyndon Johnson's 1964 Congress, when the party holding the presidency also had a substantial majority in Congress.  The correlation of forces favored the passage of the more ambitious form of the party platform: something that was not true of Joe Biden's 2020 Congress, and the difficulties he had passing legislation at the margin of Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin don't pass the mandate test.

That the 1934, 1966, and 2022 Congressional elections led to substantial reductions in the president's party's delegations in the House suggest that even the "plebiscitary mandate" is evanescent.