Brian Easton offers advice on ensuring accountability for those displaying dictator-like traits

This is a re-post of an article originally published on pundit.co.nz. It is here with permission.

With his ‘I have the right to do anything I wanna do. I'm the president of the United States.’ Donald Trump is echoing Louis XIV who may have said ‘L’état, ce’est moi’ – ‘I am the state.’*

The founding fathers of the American constitution were mindful of the authoritarian streak in English royalty; some had even claimed a ‘divine right of kings’ with unconstrained power. Charles I had made such a claim and had been beheaded. That led, several decades later, to the 1688 Bill of Rights which constrained the sovereign (it is now a part of New Zealand law) and the political writings of John Locke which were influential in the founders’ thinking when they were designing the constitution.

So they designed the American constitution with the fear of a Trump-like president (their equivalent of the sovereign) in mind. They assumed that the counterbalances from Congress and the Supreme Court would mean that a president would never try to abrogate the rule of law to the extent that Trump has. (Test it where it is ambiguous – yes.) What they perhaps did not appreciate was that the checks and balances would respond slowly and a determined president could do many things before they became binding.

I do not think it is likely that we could end up with a Prime Minister who would overrule our laws when it suited her or him. Even so, we should be concerned about the executive having unrestrained power.

From our perspective, Robert Kennedy Jnr, Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services, may be more relevant. Thus far he has not broken the law.(One restraint may be that he is a registered attorney with law degrees from two respected universities. He has even less background in the discipline of healthcare than I have.) But he has had a surprising amount of discretion within the law.

It would be easy to dismiss Kennedy as unique to America, where he is both rich and has a high public profile from his family. (His father, also Robert Kennedy, was assassinated while running for president.) When Kennedy was running for president in 2023, Trump considered him such a threat that he was offered the health secretaryship in return for his support. So he is a kind of coalition partner in the Cabinet with only a little public support. Sound familiar?

Kennedy is an acknowledged vaccine sceptic. I avoid a discussion on this view here (but read David Isaacs’ Defeating the Ministers of Death, although it finishes before the Covid pandemic, alas). Even so, during his Senate confirmation hearings he said, ‘I’m going to empower the scientists at HHS to do their job and make sure that we have good science that is evidence based … I’m not going to substitute my judgment for science.’ (my italics)

Yeah right. Since coming to power Kennedy has cut back funding of medical research, discouraged vaccination programs and either directly, or indirectly by his behaviour, laid off administrators with acknowledged expertise in the area. Illustrative of his approach, he is cutting $US500m of research funding for mRNA vaccines, claiming that they ‘fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like Covid and flu’. Had he fulfilled his promise to the Senate he would have directed the research to pay more attention to investigating this alleged failure. (My understanding is that vaccines rarely fully protect, but their enhancement of the overall quality of life more than offsets any failures. Settling the balance is an evidence-based research exercise.)

Kennedy has similarly intervened in other medical areas. Further detail would only reinforce the central issue: to what degree can a cabinet minister pursue some policy very distant from conventional understandings, when the politician has no mandate for the pursuit? That Trump is tacitly supporting Kennedy’s policies by not sacking him or reining him in, is not a satisfactory answer. It is not simply that Trump has only a limited mandate (about a third of registered voters); even that majority of that minority probably did not vote for these particular policies.

Do we observe some New Zealand Cabinet Ministers pushing personal policies with a Kennedy-like lack of attention to the evidence? Would they do so further, were they not restrained by checks and balances? As a British Lord Chancellor said, a parliamentary system is an ‘elected dictatorship’. Our dictatorship is restrained by the requirement of having an election every three years. In those thirty-six months the dictator-politicians are also subject to formal and informal checks and balances. Without them, as Trump’s ignoring of them in his first eight months well illustrates, a politician can do a lot of damage. On the other hand we expect our political leaders to lead and object to eunuchs who do nothing. It is a delicate balance.

The Coalition Government is currently putting to a referendum the proposal that New Zealand extends its three-year electoral cycle to a four-year one, thereby extending the dictatorship and weakening a key mechanism which holds our politicians accountable.

The ACT party has reservations about this power increase and suggested that we should support the four-year term if there are more checks and balances. Theirs was a grudging concession along the lines that if electoral accountability is reduced, parliament would make minor changes to strengthen the checks and balances. It has since withdrawn it; ACT has offered no alternative.

Surely the change should be the other way round. Politicians would acknowledge that the checks and balances on the executive are weak and need strengthening. They would make changes to increase their accountability. Having done this, they would then ask for a four-year electoral term.

As Trump and Kennedy demonstrate, the likelihood of politicians reducing their power belongs to the ‘yeah right’ basket.

* Another parallel with the Sun King is that Trump appears to have similar golden tastes redecorating the White House.

Appendix: Some Ways to Strengthen Accountability

1. ‘Officers of Parliament’ – the Auditor General, the Commissioner for the Environment and the Ombudsman (who is also Official Information Officer) – have accountability roles similar to MPs but with more resources and expertise. There are others with similar roles – a list is here – but because they are based in government agencies and subject to them, they are less able to hold the executive to account. They should be made officers of parliament.

2. Properly fund the Ombudsman’s office so that challenges to the executive’s Official Information restrictive decisions can be dealt with more quickly.

3. Strengthen the ability of select committees to challenge the executive. (The ACT proposal attempted to do this.)

4. Make the public accounts more transparent so they make using them for accountability easier.

5. Reduce the power of parties relative to voters by having list MPs appointed to Parliament on the basis of those who obtained the most electorate votes but did not win their seats, thereby increasing the independence of MPs. (Like the way Samoa tops up the number of women MPs.)

6. Further limit the power of those with finance to fund parties.

7. Make political lobbying more transparent.

8. Give local authorities more independence (which also means more financial independence).

*Brian Easton, an independent scholar, is an economist, social statistician, public policy analyst and historian. He was the Listener economic columnist from 1978 to 2014. This is a re-post of an article originally published on pundit.co.nz. It is here with permission.