The presidency has never fit easily within the American democratic system. The institution has always presented a fundamental challenge to a political culture that has been distrustful of centralized political power. While many Americans continually yearn for the kind of decisive leadership that presidents can provide in times of national crisis, from the founding of the republic through today, major concerns have loomed over how this power can be misused and abused.
During the constitutional debates, the leaders who were responsible for creating the architecture of our polity were uncertain about how to imagine what a republican president would look like. As Jake Rakove argues in this volume, the founders wrestled with the implications of establishing a strong singular leader in a constitutional system devoted to the division and fragmentation of power. Part of their solution in the Constitution came from adopting a mechanism that would empower Congress to remove the president should there be clear evidence that power was being misused: the impeachment process. Their solution also revolved around vesting crucial powers, such as the decisions over revenue and spending, as well as whether to declare war, in the legislative branch. Presidents have also demonstrated self-restraint, such as when President George Washington decided that he would not run for reelection, a decision that sent strong signals as to how the U.S. democracy would differ from monarchy.
Yet the restraints that were imposed on presidential power were never perfect. Like all institutions, the U.S. presidency evolved over time. As the challenges facing the nation changed, so too did the way in which Americans viewed the presidency and the institutional resources that became available to the Commander-in-Chief. Even before the twentieth centuryâtraditionally considered to be the era when the strong presidency emergedâthere were office holders who demonstrated how much of an impact a shrewd leader could have in exercising power. Few presidents came close to Abraham Lincoln between his election in 1860 and assassination in 1865 at showing how a leader could tap into all of the authority that was available from the Constitution to guide the nation through the crisis of the Civil War
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The uneasy relationship with presidential power continued through modern times. Even as the country became much more tolerant of a strong executiveâthe âImperial Presidency,â as the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
famously called itâthe concerns never disappeared. The vast expansion of the government in the twentieth century increased the number of people who worked for the executive branch and strengthened the role of in Washington in national life. Presidents found themselves managing over a massive bureaucracy. Overseas, presidents confronted decisions about when to use military force as the U.S. emerged as a major player on the world stage, both in fighting wars and maintaining the peace. Throughout these decades, much of the nation demanded a stronger presidency so that there could be someone in Washington who could make big decisions with speed and efficiency, unlike Congress, even if they still needed to obtain approval from legislators and face review from the courts. By the middle of the twentieth century, the president came to enjoy immense power that went well beyond the formal prerogatives of the Constitution. The founders could never really envision anything like the CIA or National Security Council. Starting with the Korean War in 1950, presidents would become comfortable deploying large number of troops in major arenas of conflict without formal congressional declarations of war. The quagmire in Vietnam in the 1960s made it clear how far the Commander-in-Chief could go in taking the country into a war without officially declaring a thing. The vast expansion of the national security state gave the president the ability to authorize covert operations in areas such as Central America without public approval.
The publication of this book takes place at a moment when the potential misuse of presidential power has become a central debate and President Donald Trump has exposed the ways in which the inhabitant of the officeâif they chooseâcan defy conventions
and strain institutional checks and balances. While there are many heated debates that have taken place about his leadership, the power of the presidency itself has emerged as a topic of discussion unlike in any period since the early 1970s.
Yet we never lost the fears that existed from the start. Congress never gave away all of the powers it had, often to the frustration of presidents who wanted to push their agenda. FDR, famously one of the most influential presidents of the twentieth century who scored huge legislative wins in the early part of his tenure, found his domestic agenda frustrated by the conservative coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans during his second term. The courts continued to check presidential exercises of power such as when the Supreme Court in Youngstown
ruled President Harry Trumanâs use of emergency powers in a 1952 steel strike to be unconstitutional or when the Court struck down President George W. Bushâs use of military tribunals in the Hamden
decision of 2005. There have been moments, such as in the aftermath of President Richard Nixonâs dramatic resignation from office in August 1974, that political movements, rooted in the grassroots but with allies in Congress, have pushed for significant reforms of executive power that create new checks on top of those inscribed in the Constitution. The Ethics Act of 1978 established the Office of the Independent Prosecutor to investigate executive branch corruption without any restraintâa response to the âSaturday Night Massacreâ in 1973 during which Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox.
Nor have presidents, for all their power, been immune from the vicissitudes of the electorate. Mass social movements such as civil rights have been able to push presidents into taking actions they once feared or resisted. When President John F. Kennedy finally sent his civil rights bill to the House in June 1963, he did so after grass roots activists, risking their lives and taking on authorities, had made inaction politically unacceptable. Electorates also express themselves through critical midterm elections that have the capacity to reverse presidential momentum on an agenda and empower the opposition. When Congressman Newt Gingrich headed a Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, the first time the GOP controlled both branches since 1954, President Bill Clinton found himself on the defense and shifted toward the center. The conservative movement, now inscribed in the congressional Republican caucus, made it virtually impossible for Clinton to impose big changes and attempted to impeach him. President Barack Obama encountered similar constraints after Republicans took retook control of the House in 2010.
Although we tend to think of power as resting on constitutional rules and formal organizational capacity, presidential authority has also hinged on informal norms adhered to, or ignored, by the Commander in Chief. âA presidentâs hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right,â President Lyndon Johnson once said. Never has this become so clear to Americans as with President Donald Trump who systematically has ignored many traditions of behavior that Democrats and Republicans had considered sacrosanct. The revelation was that when a president broke informal rules, there were often even fewer constraints than with formal mechanisms of power. Whereas a president could not directly undercut the Department of Justice conducting an executive branch investigation without serious repercussions, it was possible to verbally lash out against their legitimacy, going so far as to spread conspiracy theories and lies, without much consequence.
Without question, our democracy will continue to wrestle with the uneasy relationship we have with each person who sits behind the desk at the Oval Office. From the birth of our democracy, we have never figured out what to make of this powerful institution or how our other branches of government should relate to our need for some sort of centralized decision-making. The challenges have evolved as the institution of the presidency changed over time. The authors in this book, four of the most esteemed scholars of the American presidency, offer their insightful perspectives on the ongoing dynamics that have shaped this institution in the past, the ways in which the presidency has evolved and different key actors have used the role, as well as some of the big issues that lie ahead.
For the concerned citizen seeking to understand how an individual with no previous public service could become the nominee of one of the two main political parties, and then win the presidency without a majority of the popular vote, this concise examination of the evolution of the presidency from the birth of the republic to the present day is an essential place to begin.