The Executive branch is not run by committee

The latest horror from the Bush administration is that the president is stocking his cabinet with people who actually agree with him. This action has elicited precisely the howls of outrage from the Dems and the media that did not occur when President Clinton did the same thing. Cabinet officer "independence" is a virtue only when the executive is a Republican. But you knew that already.

Bret Stephens has written a very useful essay for the Wall Street Journal in which he examines the history of the relationship between presidents and their cabinet officers. Current criticism of President Bush seems to imply that the relationship is supposed to follow the "cabinet government" model, in which this branch of the government is actually run by an executive council; the president always casts the deciding vote, but never without advisory input from the council.

The sensible reader, however, will come away from Stephens' essay with the obvious conclusion:

[A] cabinet is not something a president governs with; and contrary to Andrew Jackson, it is not something a president governs around. Ideally, a cabinet is what a president governs through.

While the president is free to delegate important decisionmaking tasks to his officers, they certainly serve at his pleasure and -- as Stephens points out -- are welcome to look for other employment if they are not willing to be "tools" for the implementation of the president's policies.