John Dean
Broken Government (signed hardcover)
$25.95

John Dean was White House counsel for Richard Nixon and was a key Watergate figure. He has written extensively on the dangers of a too powerful executive branch and is a regular commentator on television. His latest work is the last of a trilogy of books detailing the crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush Administration, which began with Worse than Watergate and continued with Conservatives Without Conscience. His most recent book, and third installment of the trilogy is Broken Government.

Reed Barker from A Cappella Books sat down (on the phone) with former White House counsel John Deanto discuss his new book, Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches. Dean spoke at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library & Museum on September 17.

A Cappella Books: Mr. Dean it’s good to talk to you today. Your new book is called Broken Government, so why don’t you tell us what’s broken?

John Dean: Well, rather than trying to catalog all the things that have fallen apart under Republican rule, I focused on the legislative, executive and judicial branches and looked at the underlying constitutional problems, fault lines if you will, to see what Republicans had done.

I was fairly startled when I took it apart and deconstructed it piece by piece to see how they had, in essence, when they controlled Congress, they had shattered long-standing regular order, traditions, constitutional provisions, just ignoring that in their quest for pure power means rather than trying to govern. These are not just my own perceptions, but I relied on other people, scientists and journalists who were shuddered by the same thing.

Before the 2006 elections, people finally started speaking out about how undemocratic the Congress had become under Republican rule. So I thought I should address that. Fortunately, that’s a branch that’s being repaired.

I then turned to the executive branch, and the most conspicuous thing that’s happened there, while the roots go back to the presidency I was involved in, the Nixon presidency, and they blossomed somewhat in the Reagan and the Bush I presidency, they’ve really come to full fruition in Bush II, and that is a really violent attack on, again, traditional procedures, taking the so called “Imperial Presidency” of Richard Nixon and pushing it way beyond even those limits into something that‘s innocuously entitled the “Unitary Executive” or the “Unilateral Executive,” however you want to look at it. But it’s a presidency that we know that American people rejected with Watergate, and it’s baffling to me that the conservative authoritarians that now run the Republican party have latched on to this as almost a mantra of what they want the presidency to be. And they just keep pushing the envelope and pushing it and pushing it, and it’s really quite dangerous.

I really can’t believe that if Americans think about what’s happening at this level in the name of fighting terrorism, they want to have terrorists accomplish what their goal, is which to disrupt our liberties and our rights. So I focus on the executive branch.

Then I turned finally to the branch that people focus on the least and are least familiar with but which might affect their lives more than any other and that’s the judicial branch and look at the patterns over the last four decades when you have Republican presidents who have gotten it into their bonnets that they’re going to take a non political branch and politicize it.

It really starts with Nixon and all the other Republican presidents except for Ford. Ford is there so briefly he can’t fit into this category and Carter and Clinton don’t play the same game that the Republican s do which is to try to use political philosophy to drive all their court appointments, particularly at the Supreme Court, and they’ve done so.

Not only do we have a conservative majority on the court today, we have what I describe, as I break it down into very general lay terms, we are approaching a fundamentalist court, and this is going to take American jurisprudence someplace that is difficult for me to believe that the overwhelming majority of Americans want to go.

So I lay these problems out because I see them as serious problems, process problems, and process gets ignored in presidential campaigns. Democrats took it totally off the table in 2004, to my surprise. So I’ve written this book to complete a trilogy if you will, the first was “Worse than Watergate” and “Conservatives without Conscience” the second, and looking at both of those books I noticed how Democrats have really lost interest in process and the Democratic rank and file people have paid less attention to process and today’s in Washington, with Republicans trying to get back in charge, process is the name of the game.

Can you give us an example of where regular order is breaking down and how process is affecting what we are seeing in Washington?

The rules that govern, say the House of Representatives, are designed to manage a very large body of 435 people. Clearly not everyone can talk at once, as they can, say in the Senate. However, both with Republicans and Democrats prior, it was a highly deliberative body.

When Newt Gingrich took control in 1994, he started initiating, and it stared about 3 years in, a dictatorial approach to how he would govern the House. They just virtually eliminated the deliberative process. They had closed rules, when each piece of legislation comes to the floor it has rules that govern debate on it. They closed all those rules. When you have the House and Senate differing on a piece of legislation, you have to go to a conference committee to resolve the differences. What happens under Republicans is they exclude the Democrats from participating in the conferences. They, in essence said, “We don’t want you there, if you come, if you show up, we will close down the conference meeting.” And they would also, often in conference, totally rewrite legislation passed by one of the bodies. It’s really quite remarkable stuff.

Have you seen that change under the Democrats?

I have. It has changed. They have already implemented changes. One of the first things Speaker Pelosi did. The abandonment of the Democratic and deliberate process was much more severe in the House than it was in the Senate. What she did and Republicans were fully expecting retribution to set in like they had done when they took control, but they didn’t. The Republicans were braced for it. Well it didn’t happen. Pelosi did the opposite. She said, “I want to return civility to this body. I want to return deliberation.” Yes, we are going to push some things through, with cut rules to get things through, but you must realize that the way Republicans took control in 1984, was they literally set out to destroy the House of Representatives. They had no compunction at all, and they did so.

They tarnished the reputation of both old time Republicans who weren’t playing ball the way they wanted, the moderates, the liberals, the progressives as well as Democrats. They had shenanigans like a member of the House coming out wearing a paper bag on his head saying, “I’m too ashamed of the House to be seen.” And it worked and that’s how they got control, and that’s what they are doing now, playing obstructionist games to make it difficult for the Democrats to run the place. That way the public doesn’t get in and sort this out and follow these processes. And it will help them regain control.

The Republicans are going to come back in 2008 and say, “Listen, the Democrats aren’t any good at running this place, look at how little they’ve done.” In fact, we have on the desk, as you and I are talking now; the President has a major reform of the lobbying and ethics procedures of the House and Senate. There is a threat being talked about in Washington that Bush may veto this reform legislation, which the Republicans would love. They dare not. But it would, again, be obstructionist so the Democrats can’t get credit for cleaning up the town.

What’s the end game to destroying institutions? What do they get out of it?

It’s power. It’s power. They don’t want to govern, they want to rule and when you, for example, in the House and the Congress, they mastered the art of the one vote victory in the Supreme Court. All they want is one more vote and a safe majority so they can rewrite the rules. They can do things through 5 members of that Court they can’t do through the legislative or the executive process. So this is a power play. And it is a not representation of the will of the overwhelming majority, it is a small minority that is controlling and calling the shots.

This whole grab for power seems to be not only a shift in government but in business. The only moral principle in business seems to be the bottom line. How do you fix something that is so pervasive across the culture?

I think the first thing is broad and wide recognition of the problem. I happen to be a glass half full type of person, and while I try and be realistic about it, I think you give people, the broad width and breadth of the American public, the information, and they instinctively do the right thing. Sure, there are those who game and play the system. They will try and get power; they will try to get profit. But when that broader public learns what’s going on, they get their back up. And they won’t tolerate it. They can sort right from wrong.

I think the classic example of this is the jury system. You take 12 men and women with varying professions, varying degrees of education and varying degrees of background and even interest in the case they’re are watching and they seem to sort through, I mean more often than not, maybe 99 percent of time they get it right. They get it right on the information they are given. The cases that get reversed rarely get reversed because the jury got it wrong, they get reversed because the lawyers have manipulated the case in what they’ve let the jury hear and know or what laws they’ve been told applies.

I think we have good old common sense in this country to sort out what is right and wrong. That’s one of the interesting things I talk about in the book, is that the way the process really works. People don’t need to know these rules, because in their gut they know if this process is right or wrong. There is a lot of talk on the campaign trail about policy. I’ve found from empirical research that people don’t really understand the policy questions nearly as well as they know the process. They know when they are getting screwed. They can spot that. They have good antenna and when process is being distorted, that’s who knows they are on the wrong end of it.

The rules, the traditions, the Constitution , the laws the governing procedures, the parliamentary procedures are all designed to make it fair play, so people don’t have to understand the rules however to know when they are getting the short end. They don’t have to understand what a “motion to recommit” is, or what a cloture motion is or how an executive order is issued. They know when they are getting the short end.

How do you make the public aware in the current climate of public discourse where you have Fox News and everything controlling what we are seeing?

Well, one of the things I found interesting in my research was that those who become interested in the process become the most savvy political creatures, voters or activists or whatever tend to fall in that category. They know when they are watching Fox or when they are listening to NPR, they can sort out the different points of view and broader and less propagandistic points of view just as they acquire knowledge.

The reality of what we are dealing with here is that there are lots of people who just don’t give a damn. They don’t care about what’s happening. And they don’t believe it is affecting them directly until they become interested and that’s all I care about, just knowing that they do become interested if something affects them directly, that the process is there for them to play and to come to play. Because I think that those who do follow the system are sufficient that they can keep the system working properly and honestly.

You can’t hope to have everybody in this country involved. We as a nation, ever since polling was first introduced back in the thirties, have a remarkable lack knowledge about how our system works. It’s horrifying the small number of people who can tell you who controls the House and the Senate. They can’t tell you anything except the most visible of presidential policies. The fact that we have a war in Iraq, they understand. That we have the most secretive presidency that’s ever happened in the United States that’s ignoring constitutional requirements like getting the consent of Congress or permitting oversight of the executive branch as contemplated by the founders. They don’t know anything about that. They don’t care anything about that.

I deal in the book with something called “Stealth Democracy.” There’s a rather interesting study by some very sophisticated University of Nebraska political scientists who found, looking at the way people react to government that people actually like the government best when they know the least about how it is operating. They just want it to work and work right and not be out to screw them. What happens is, when they realize they are getting screwed, they want to get involved. So I’m trying to give people who want to get involved and are getting involved the insights into the how the thing is really working now and where the problem areas are.

What’s the best place for people to start to learn more about the process?

Well, the obvious answer to that question is to read my book. I’m sure your bookstore is full of books they should read. Today we have more information available through the internet than we’ve ever had. There are great filters for that information. You can very quickly find bloggers who go out and aggregate news and sort out things of interest to you. I happen to be someone who believes that you should read both things you believe in and don’t believe in so you can understand the whole spectrum.

My favorites in my blogs run across the political spectrum. I read everybody because I’m curious to see what everyone is thinking. Knowledge comes from exposure. Exposure is taking advantage of the information that’s so wonderfully available to Americans, and increasingly, people around the world.

So who are the good guys these days? Who’s doing the right thing?

I consider myself, in many regards, a Goldwater conservative. I’m a registered independent. I don’t vote by party. I don’t carry water for either party, but it’s quite clear to me that Republicans have failed America at the national level in really striking and startling ways. The Republicans can’t be trusted as they are now constituted to run the national government. They just have nothing but their own self interest at the top of their agenda. Sure there are exceptions, but I’m talking about as a rule.

The Democrats, however, are very concerned about the broader public. So, to answer your question, they are the good guys right now. They have a very diverse party. They are more concerned about the average American than the Republicans are. I think that is certainly being recognized by younger people.

I have for years been a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California. I’ve noticed that with each class, over the last 5 years or so with new generations coming in, they are more and more progressive. They are less and less inclined to believe in the elitist ideas that conservatism has made the vogue for so many years, and they are much more concerned about what the government can do for people, how they can help and participate. It’s really quite striking to me, and it’s been quite noticeable in the last couple of years in particular with freshmen groups. I do have a pretty big class so I do get a good cross section of kids.

That brings us to the judicial branch. Are there parallels between the Roberts nomination and the Rehnquist nomination which you wrote about years ago?

There are sad parallels. What I deal with, is I track how all, really, the recent members of the Court have been selected, and particularly those who are described in legal circles as fundamentalists. Fundamentalists are people who go back and say what the founders said is what should apply. What they are really using is an interpretive device to undermine a lot of progressive civil liberties type rulings by the court which they don’t like. There are authoritarian personalities on the court. They do as I say, not necessarily as I do.

What’s happening is that if we have any more appointees at the high level, and I should preface this by saying that the Supreme Court, of course, controls not only affects the case that it rules on, that is before it but it affects those that are parties for that case, but it affects all the lower courts who get similar cases and must follow that ruling. So in essence it becomes the law of the land. While any given ruling of the Supreme Court is only binding on the people who are subject to the ruling and are litigating before the court, the impact of the case, however, is far broader.

They are changing the law and pushing it in the exact opposite direction the nation is going. As the nation becomes more concerned about people who don’t have all the advantages of those who have wealth and opportunity, it’s trying to go in the exact opposite direction. As the country becomes more tolerant of homosexuality and abortion and things like this, they [the Supreme Court] are going in the opposite direction. So what happens is, if you get judges on the lower courts who are bound by their oath to honor their Constitution and understand that the Constitution is what the Supreme Court, really 5 members, say it is, there is a lot of latitude for lower court judges to start pushing the areas of new law and start developing new law that rigid, authoritarian, conservatives now defined by Republicans don’t do.

We’ve got to hope, first of all, if God forbid, another vacancy opened up on the Supreme Court while Bush is still in office or before he leaves in January of 2009, for the Senate to actually say, “We will not confirm another one of your justices. We don’t care who you put up there. That court can operate with 8 people. And we’re not putting anyone up because we’re not having the court tilted any further to the right.”

There are several members of the court, Ruth Ginsberg and John Stephens who are getting up in years and while they seem to be in good health at the time when you are in your 80’s or have had prior illness, anything can happen. We had the Chief Justice who is young and theoretically healthy have a seizure this summer right out of no where. So you never know what will happen. It’s a very human institution.

I think the Senate has got to say until after the next election that they will not confirm anybody for any high court position. And they should restrain themselves on even the court of appeals. Trial courts don’t have as great an impact as the appellate courts. I think it’s got to be an issue, what the Republicans have done to the courts and the federal judiciary in the 2008 campaign. I don’t like the politicized campaign that deals with the court. I think it’s been wrong. But until we get it back and adjusted, because Republians are not going to stop. They are going to be supporting and submitting nominations that are far right because of how they play that far right base of the party. And the Democrats just have to deal with it. They have to fight it head on.

In the Nixon era you said there was a “cancer on the presidency.” How would you describe the presidency today?

Broken. What’s happened is that Bush and Cheney have pushed the presidency off its constitutional foundation in everything from their use of secrecy to their signing statements that all embrace this unitary executive theory which is really the imperial presidency on steroids.

The book is coming out on 9/11 is that by design?

That’s the publisher and if it has some meaning, they haven’t told me.

One last question. You are in the unique position of having seen yourself portrayed in movies and on TV by a number of different people from Martin Sheen or David Hyde Pierce. Who’s your favorite portrayal of yourself?

I thought that they’ve all done a good job. I’ve gotten to know the people who played those roles. They’ve all read my work and have tried to play it right down the middle.
I also found out that I got a credit on the movie “Dick” where I am portrayed. A friend of mine who ran that studio sent me the script and I said it could be a great movie if the girls could pull it off. And they did. He gave me a consultant’s role on it, which I didn’t want.

List price: $25.95