Trinidad Express
Tobago News
Trinidad Guardian
Divine right of presidents
January 7, 2001
By Denis Solomon
PRESIDENT Arthur NR Robinson's performance in his televised address to the nation on Friday evening was a masterpiece. Dignified, coherent, controlled and erudite, it was also hard-hitting, and despite repeated references to personal fallibility, uncompromising.
That was the problem. The address was Presidential in all aspects but one. It was undiplomatic. Mr Robinson's speech offered no solution except capitulation by his opponent. (Unless the statement that the public must decide on what was good for it was a call for a new election). Diplomacy is not the art of clear statement. It is the art of fudging; of producing solutions ambiguous enough to enable each side to put its own interpretation on them and so save face. An address by the Head of State to the nation at a moment of crisis can be Presidential only in appearance if it intensifies rather than diminishes the conflict.
Mr Robinson's address was therefore a magnificent sermon to the converted. What strong language there was in it must have enraged the UNC's supporters as much as it delighted their opponents. Terms like "dictatorship" and "subversion" were all the more striking for the calm reasonableness of their context. Mr Robinson made the surprising affirmation, for a lawyer, that voter-padding had taken place, because charges had been laid.
His references to the challenges brought against election candidates "for making false declarations" (the challenges are not for making false declarations, but for being ineligible because of citizenship) were references to the UNC candidates and not the PNM ones.
Everyone knows that the latter objections are frivolous, and were designed to prevent him using the former to avoid swearing in a government; but this speech was not the place to suggest it. The appointment of Lindsay Gillette to act as Prime Minister was condemned for the piece of arrogance it undoubtedly was.
To bolster the already strong suggestion of dishonesty on the part of his power-hungry antagonists, Mr Robinson also took a side-swipe at the President of the Bar Association, accusing him of inaccuracies and of trying to pass off a personal statement as a decision of the Association.
As a political polemic, the speech was also magnificent. The prime ministerial faction had sought to cut the ground from under the President's feet by asking him, in a semblance of compromise, to appoint the seven "losers" to the Senate alone, not the Cabinet. This Mr Robinson countered, within the larger context of his "gradual descent to dictatorship" theme, with the argument that Senators today could easily become Ministers tomorrow. This raised the spectre of Ganace Ramdial waiting in the wings to finish the job once Robinson was out of the way. When he referred to increasing crime as part of the framework of national degeneration, an image of Sumairsingh hovered in the background.
What constitutional arguments the President advanced for his stand were of necessity philosophical rather than legal. For a lawyer, trained to take advantage of the minutiae of statutes, he did a magnificent job of the very opposite: extolling the need for interpretation of statutes, including Constitutions, on the basis of their guiding principles. In this he mixed the folk wisdom of his mother with the philosophy of Locke and the erudition of Jennings and Wade. The burden of his argument was that public officials hold power in trust. Unfettered governmental power is a contradiction in terms. Absolutism comes in dribs and drabs. To guard against this, the citizens of a country must at all times look not only to the present but also to the future.
But who is to point them in the right direction? Here Mr Robinson was on the slipperiest part of his argument. Obviously, on this occasion he was the signpost, the Chief Executive, the man at the "centre" (not the "top") of the structure of institutions, required by his status as human being, not rubber stamp, to use his brains. But what is there in the office of President that makes his opinion superior to the opinion of those who put him there? To be valid, the argument requires some authentication of Presidential power from outside the system. Something approaching divine right.
To this conundrum Mr Robinson had two answers, both of them implicit rather than explicit. One was his insistence on fallibility. Bring me logical, legally-based arguments, free of emotion and personal bias, he said, and I may change my mind. The second was implicit in his reference to the philosophical-religious underpinnings of human society. Hobbes says human beings are savage and irrational, and need a strong hand to govern them; Locke says they can be rational. But what determines that a rational man will be available when needed? Obviously, God, the first element to which the Preamble to the Constitution pays homage.
Both these arguments are tendentious. Logic is a means of avoiding false conclusions, not a motive for action. Logic tells us that IF a, THEN b. In politics there is no IF. There are no logical arguments either for or against democracy. Its value can only be pragmatic or emotional. Once democracy is accepted, what argument can there be against laws being interpreted on the basis of democratic principle? The problem is that one person's ideas of how this interpretation is to be accomplished are as good as another's. The two are not distinguished by logic.
As for the implication that God will send the right man at the right time, any emerging society that operates on that theory is in for a rude shock.
So Mr Robinson's address was at once too broad and too narrow. Not only did it offer no diplomatic solution to the immediate crisis, it seemed to suggest that reasonable behaviour on all sides, mediated by Presidential wisdom, would be a sufficient safeguard against future decline into dictatorship. The first step in this decline would be the appointment of "losers" to the Senate and the Cabinet. But Mr Robinson neglected to suggest what, if this were to happen, the next step could be, and why any further steps would not be prevented by the Constitution as it stands. Sixteen "losers" in the Senate is not forbidden by the Constitution; seventeen is.
At the other extreme, the President made no reference to the extent to which the Constitution as it stands has already led to an undesirable degree of executive power; how this is manifested in the present situation; and what institutional measures, as opposed to philosophical exhortations, could rectify it.
In fact, Mr Robinson's only reference to the provisions of the Constitution, as opposed to its guiding principles, came when, in an echo of the Mexican's traditional lament ("Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States") and of Virgil's comparison of his birthplace with the town of his education ("Poor Mantua, too close to Cremona"), he declaimed "Poor Tobago! Only two seats out of thirty-one."
Copyright © 2004 Denis Solomon