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BY JONAH GOLDBERG

Let’s skip ahead to after the election. No matter who wins, the next president will declare that they have a “mandate” to do something. And they will be wrong.

The whole canard that a newly elected president is for some reason entitled to have their way is an invention. The word “mandate” doesn’t appear in the Constitution or the Federalist Papers.

The myth can be traced to Andrew Jackson. He shuttered the Second Bank of the United States partly on the grounds that he ran on doing so – though his campaign hardly revolved around the issue – but he relied even more on the notion that he was “the people’s president.” Jackson introduced the argument that because the president is elected by the whole country, his agenda has unique legitimacy and urgency. This “constituted a revolutionary change in the conceptualization of the basis of presidential power,” the presidential historians Richard J. Ellis and Steven Kirk wrote, establishing the idea that the president derives some extra-constitutional authority from his connection to the people.

Proponents of the idea that the president is the singular instrument of the “will of the people” – sometimes called the “plebiscitary mandate” – typically insinuate that presidents outrank Congress because they have the backing of a national majority while legislators wield only narrow, sectarian mandates from their districts or states.

This is anti-constitutional, quasi-authoritarian, mystical codswallop.

The Constitution is incandescently clear on this point: Congress is the supreme branch of government. It writes the laws, declares war, levies taxes, creates most of the courts and executive agencies, and pays their officials’ salaries. It can fire members of the other branches, but the other branches can’t fire members of Congress.

Congressional majorities – and hence congressional mandates – form around specific issues and interests as a result of deliberation and compromise. Or at least they do when Congress works.

Vice President Kamala Harris has been shrewdly opaque about her agenda; she has been far more detailed about the positions she no longer holds than she has about the ones she does. When asked for specifics about what she would do if elected, she often offers word salads and nostrums about bringing people together. Beyond fighting for expanded abortion rights, her only plausible claim to a mandate is not being Donald Trump, a pledge she would achieve on “Day One.”

Trump hasn’t offered many specifics either, but some of the few he has are very controversial. Many of his supporters insist he doesn’t really mean them: Take him seriously, not literally, as they say. He won’t really send troops and police officers to drag millions of immigrants who are here illegally from their homes, presumably to put them in camps before deporting them. He won’t actually impose massive, across-the-board tariffs or prosecute his political enemies in pursuit of “retribution.”

But you can be sure that if he is elected, many Republicans will claim he has a mandate to do exactly that.

The core problem with mandate-mania is this: Presidential electoral majorities never speak with one voice in favor of a policy platform. In 2020, many people voted against Trump more than for Biden. Virtually no one voted for him to be reincarnated FDR, as a cabal of historians encouraged him to be, after he was elected. If voters wanted that, Biden would have campaigned on that and voters would have elected the congressional majorities they gave Roosevelt.

Presidential elections are job interviews. The person the voters hire will have only one real mandate: to do the job delineated by the Constitution.

(Jonah Goldberg is an editorial writer for the Chattanooga Times Press)