America’s great political dysfunction has occasioned many proposed cures in recent years, but perhaps none so original as that posited by David Orentlicher in his Two Presidents Are Better Than One. As its title indicates, the book is an argument for altering the structure of the U.S. presidency to change the familiar single chief executive to two co-presidents.
Orentlicher proposes that the Constitution be changed to have two presidents, elected at the same time, with the positions going to the top two vote-getters, who would presumably come from different political parties. They would share the White House and the presidential office equally, with each having to sign bills into law, command the military, approve unilateral executive actions, and nominate various government officials. Everything that the sole president presently does, two presidents would do in tandem.
Orentlicher claims that a dual executive would cure a host of ills, but he focuses on three main ones and devotes a chapter to each. First, echoing a major theme in presidency research, he contends that the presidency has become far more powerful than the framers intended. He says that “the external checks and balances of Congress and the Supreme Court have not worked as intended” (p. 69) and that “If presidential power cannot be contained from outside, it should be contained from within the executive branch” (p. 80). A dual presidency would supposedly reign in executive excess and thereby restore the proper constitutional balance, as “it would decrease the ability of the executive branch to exercise its power or to usurp the power of the legislative branch” (p. 70).
Second, echoing a popular contemporary complaint, Orentlicher contends that U.S. politics suffers from hyper-partisanship. A dual presidency would ameliorate this because it would end the one-party monopoly on executive power, and the two presidents would have to move beyond their partisan differences and compromise and find common ground. Furthermore, it would facilitate greater representation, as the over sixty million citizens who now vote for a presidential loser feel they have no representation in the White House. It might also make presidential bids by third party candidates more realistic.
Third, Orentlicher suggests that a dual presidency would make better decisions, since “two heads are better than one” (p. 144). With two presidents, each would provide a check on the shortcomings and oversights of the other, such that mistakes could be better avoided. Orentlicher says that a dual presidency would have averted calamities like the Bay of Pigs, Watergate, the invasion of Iraq, and perhaps even the Great Depression.
If Orentlicher’s intention is to be provocative, then he has certainly succeeded. And if his intention is to get us to think more carefully about how the structure of the presidency contributes to various problems, then there too he has succeeded. Indeed, much of the book can be read as a useful thought experiment designed to shed new light on old issues by getting the reader to think outside the box. But if Orentlicher’s primary intention is to argue convincingly for a dual chief executive, the book is at times less than persuasive. He fires off a lot of quick arguments in support of his proposal, almost just to see what works, and not everything does.
Orentlicher contends that a plural presidency would comport with and further develop the framers’ general constitutional principle of employing divisions to prevent tyranny: Just as a bicameral legislature prevents congressional excess, a dual presidency would prevent executive excess. In other words, he suggests that the framers’ basic approach was sound but they failed to fully apply it. Also, he contends that the executive branch is already less than unitary by virtue of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve. In short, a plural presidency would not be as radical a change is it might appear.
In terms of historical precedents, Orentlicher notes France’s experience with “cohabitation” governments, the Swiss Federal Council, the Roman Republic, and various examples from the corporate world with the CEO sharing power with the board president. He argues for the benefits of cooperative decision-making (with brief allusions to game theory) and for the benefits of an institutionalized diversity of points of view (with a nod to the dangers of groupthink). He also invokes medicine and the ideal of shared doctor-patient decision-making, egalitarian parenting and family management, and even the merits of diversification in investing, all in the course of arguing for a shared presidency. (All that’s missing is music: the book’s thesis will remind pop culture connoisseurs of the mid-90s alt-rock band The Presidents of the United States of America, but one could also invoke the great pop-rock pairings of John and Paul or Mick and Keith as reasons to prefer partnerships over solo efforts.)
Orentlicher notes that the chief proponent of a single chief executive was Alexander Hamilton, and he tries to rebut some of Hamilton’s arguments in Federalist 70. For example, he says that the Hamiltonian concern with the speed of presidential action is less relevant today: “Presidential dispatch is less important for an executive branch that has become much more of a maker than an executor of public policy” (p. 155). Orentlicher also suggests that Hamilton failed to appreciate the viability of shared decision-making because of the times he lived in: Since he was familiar only with the traditional “dominant husband-father” model of family relations, Hamilton supposedly could not envision two parents equally sharing household decisions, such that the constraints of 18th century sexism led to a constrained constitutional vision (p. 186).
Obviously, some of the above points are more persuasive than others. And while Orentlicher seeks to marshal every possible argument in his favor, he neglects to mention that there is some historical precedent for a dual American presidency, at least in terms of the talk of a spousal “co-presidency” that swirled around Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1992 and Bob and Elizabeth Dole in 1988 and 1996. There is also little attention to the role of the vice presidents or impeachment in his proposed system.
The book’s penultimate chapter addresses whether and how such a change in the presidency could actually occur. Orentlicher claims that interest groups, members of Congress, and the American public all would have reasons to support a constitutional amendment for a dual presidency. That might be, but it is also true that the Constitution is extraordinarily difficult to formally amend. And as Orentlicher concedes, Americans have a strong cultural attachment to the idea of a single leader, or a quasi-religious longing for a single savior or superhero, even though that ideal is unrealistic and “undermines citizen participation in the democratic process” (p. 169). Ultimately, whatever the benefits of a dual presidency might be, it is unlikely to occur. For better or worse, the United States is likely stuck with its old constitutional architecture and hence with one president. Still, “even if a two-person presidency would not be adopted, there is much to gain by its consideration” (p. 20).
