What makes an imperial president

After the Democrats lost Congress in , Clinton used these new powers to maximum effect. By directing the bureaucracy to implement his program, he could make an end-run around Congress, but at a grave risk to the rule of law. These regulatory power grabs were facilitated by another development that began in the Nixon administration. Over the last generation, presidents have created an elite corps of lawyers who have powerful incentives to tell them what they want to hear.

This staff has grown to include about 40 extremely able lawyers — but all gain their jobs through political connections. This also is increasingly true of the 25 lawyers who serve in the special division of the Justice Department, the Office of Legal Counsel, that continues to advise the president. Unfortunately, the current administration has done nothing to change this arrangement. Obama loyalists have simply replaced Bush loyalists in key legal positions. Like their predecessors, they are in a position to generate impressive-looking legal documents to support presidential assertions of unilateral power at home and abroad.

Bush's conduct of the "war on terrorism" remains one of the most popular features of his presidency. And on the surveillance matter in particular, there is no public consensus that he has gone over a line. It is possible the courts will reverse Bush on his most questionable use of presidential powers.

But don't bet on it. The Bush White House vetted both Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court's two newest members, with careful attention to their judicial track records of sympathy for strong executive authority. Another reason to predict a bright future for the Imperial Presidency is Bush's establishment of the principle of pre-emptive warfare as a central strategy to protect against terrorist attack.

Even more than the Cold War policy of containment did, this strategy tends to concentrate power in the executive. And, finally, no one should underestimate the ability of presidents to set, unilaterally, by fiat, precedents that broaden the sweep of America's national security commitments. In the wake of recent menacing statements from Iran against Israel, Bush appeared to do just that.

No president has ever been that explicit about a pledge to protect Israel; Congress has never been asked to approve a treaty commitment of that sort.

Debate over the Imperial Presidency tends to get diverted by complex questions of constitutional law on which the experts, who are themselves not devoid of political ideologies, disagree and probably always will. Both critics and advocates of the institution should have to set forth and defend their vision of America's position in the world. After all, the core, underlying reason that America has come to have an Imperial Presidency is not because of the essays of Alexander Hamilton and not because of a modern tendency to have strong-willed presidents, acquiescent Congresses, and deferential courts.

It is because America has an Imperium. When you visit our website, we store cookies on your browser to collect information. The information collected might relate to you, your preferences or your device, and is mostly used to make the site work as you expect it to and to provide a more personalized web experience.

However, you can choose not to allow certain types of cookies, which may impact your experience of the site and the services we are able to offer. Click on the different category headings to find out more and change our default settings according to your preference.

You cannot opt-out of our First Party Strictly Necessary Cookies as they are deployed in order to ensure the proper functioning of our website such as prompting the cookie banner and remembering your settings, to log into your account, to redirect you when you log out, etc.

For more information about the First and Third Party Cookies used please follow this link. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so.

You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www. Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, you have the right to opt-out of the sale of your personal information to third parties. These cookies collect information for analytics and to personalize your experience with targeted ads. You may exercise your right to opt out of the sale of personal information by using this toggle switch.

If you opt out we will not be able to offer you personalised ads and will not hand over your personal information to any third parties. Additionally, you may contact our legal department for further clarification about your rights as a California consumer by using this Exercise My Rights link.

If you have enabled privacy controls on your browser such as a plugin , we have to take that as a valid request to opt-out. Therefore we would not be able to track your activity through the web. This may affect our ability to personalize ads according to your preferences. Targeting cookies may be set through our site by our advertising partners.

They may be used by those companies to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant adverts on other sites. They do not store directly personal information, but are based on uniquely identifying your browser and internet device.

If you do not allow these cookies, you will experience less targeted advertising. Social media cookies are set by a range of social media services that we have added to the site to enable you to share our content with your friends and networks. They are capable of tracking your browser across other sites and building up a profile of your interests. This may impact the content and messages you see on other websites you visit. If you do not allow these cookies you may not be able to use or see these sharing tools.

If you want to opt out of all of our lead reports and lists, please submit a privacy request at our Do Not Sell page. A cookie is a small piece of data text file that a website — when visited by a user — asks your browser to store on your device in order to remember information about you, such as your language preference or login information.

Those cookies are set by us and called first-party cookies. We also use third-party cookies — which are cookies from a domain different than the domain of the website you are visiting — for our advertising and marketing efforts. More specifically, we use cookies and other tracking technologies for the following purposes:.

We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.

Skip to Content. Leadership Voices Podcasts. Events About Newsletters. Featured eBooks. Paul Starobin February 22, By Paul Starobin. Prince Alexander: The Worldly Philosopher What was it that led Hamilton to think in such bold terms about executive powers? King Richard: The Abuser The postwar Imperial Presidency attracted fawning members of the intellectual elite who were just about as dazzled by the specter of the new American global goliath as were the commanders-in-chief.

Third Generation Cheney was hardly the only member of the George W. Share This:. This website uses cookies to enhance user experience and to analyze performance and traffic on our website. We also share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners. Cookie Preferences Cookie List. Do Not Sell My Personal Information When you visit our website, we store cookies on your browser to collect information.

Allow All Cookies. Still, the idea is right, and the process of accountability has to begin inside the President himself. A constitutional President can do many things, but he has to believe in the discipline of consent.

It is not enough that he personally thinks the country is in trouble and genuinely believes he alone knows how to save it. In all but the most extreme cases, action has to be accompanied by public explanation and tested by public acceptance.

A constitutional President has to be aware of what Whitman called "the never-ending audacity of elected persons" and has to understand the legitimacy of challenges to his own judgment and authority. He has to be sensitive directly to the diversity of concern and conviction in the nation, sensitive prospectively to the verdict of history, sensitive always to the decent respect pledged in the Declaration of Independence to the opinions of mankind. Yet Presidents chosen as open and modest men are not sure to remain so amid the intoxications of the office; and the office has grown steadily more intoxicating in recent years.

A wise President, having read George Reedy and observed the fates of Johnson and Nixon, will take care to provide himself, while there still is time, with antidotes to intoxication. Presidents in the last quarter of the twentieth century might, as a beginning, plan to rehabilitate I use the word in almost the Soviet sense the executive branch of government. This does not mean the capitulation of the presidency to the permanent government; nor should anyone forget that it was the unresponsiveness of the permanent government that gave rise to the aggressive White House of the twentieth century.

But it does mean a reduction in the size and power of the White House staff and the restoration of the access and prestige of the executive departments. The President will always need a small and alert personal staff to serve as his eyes and ears and one lobe of his brain, but he must avoid a vast and possessive staff ambitious to make all the decisions of government. Above all, he must not make himself the prisoner of a single information system.

No sensible President will give one man control of all the channels of communication; any man sufficiently wise to exercise such control properly ought to be President himself. As for the Cabinet, while no President in American history has found it a very satisfactory instrument of government, it has served Presidents best when it has contained men strong and independent in their own right, strong enough to make the permanent government responsive to presidential policy and independent enough to carry honest dissents into the Oval Office.

Franklin Roosevelt, who is fashionably regarded these days as the cause of it all, is really a model of how a strong President can operate within the constitutional order. While no President wants to create the impression that his Administration is out of control, FDR showed how a masterful President could maintain the most divergent range of contacts, surround himself with the most articulate and positive colleagues, and use debate within the executive branch as a means of clarifying issues and trying out people and policies.

Or perhaps FDR is in a way the cause of it all, because he alone had the vitality, flair, and cunning to be clearly on top without repressing everything underneath. In a joke that Henry Wallace, not usually a humorous man, told in my hearing in , FDR could keep all the balls in the air without losing his own.

Some of his successors tried to imitate his mastery without understanding the sources of his strength. But not every President is an FDR, and FDR himself, though his better instincts generally won out in the end, was a flawed, willful, and, with time, increasingly arbitrary man. When Presidents begin to succumb to delusions of grandeur, when the checks and balances inside themselves stop operating, external checks and balances may well become necessary to save the republic.

The nature of an activist President in any case, in Samuel Lubell's phrase, is to run with the ball until he is tackled. As conditions abroad and at home have nourished the imperial presidency, tacklers have had to be more than usually sturdy and intrepid. How to make external checks effective? Congress can tie the presidency down by a thousand small legal strings; but, like Gulliver, the President can always break loose. The effective means of controlling the presidency lie not in law but in politics.

For the American President rules by influence; and the withdrawal of consent, by Congress, by the press, by public opinion, can bring any President down. The great Presidents have understood this. The President, said Andrew Jackson, must be "accountable at the bar of public opinion for every act of his Administration.

Holding a President to strict accountability requires, first of all, a new attitude on the part of the American people toward their Presidents, or rather a return to the more skeptical attitude of earlier times: it requires, specifically, a decline in reverence. An insistent theme in Nixon's public discourse is the necessity of maintaining due respect for the presidency.

The possibility that such respect might be achieved simply by being a good President evidently does not reassure him. He is preoccupied with "respect for the office" as an entity in itself. Can one imagine Washington or Lincoln or the Roosevelts or Truman or Kennedy going on in public, as Nixon repeatedly does, about how important it is to do this or that in order to maintain "respect for the office"?

But the age of the imperial presidency has produced the idea that run-of-the-mill politicians, brought by fortuity to the White House, must be treated thereafter as if they have become superior and perhaps godlike beings. The Nixon theoreticians even try to transform reverence into an ideology, propagating' the doctrine, rather novel in the United States, that institutions 'of authority are entitled to respect per se, whether or not they have done anything to earn respect.

If authority is denied respect, the syllogism ran, the whole social order will be in danger. To this question the Nixon ideologues apparently answer yes. An older American tradition would say no, incredulous that anyone would see this as a question. In that spirit I would argue that what the country needs today is a little serious disrespect for the office of the presidency; a refusal to give any more weight to a President's words than the intelligence of the utterance, if spoken by anyone else, would command; an understanding of the point made so aptly by Montaigne: "Sits he on never so high a throne, a man still sits on his bottom.

But what if men not open and modest, even the start, but from the start ambitious of power and contemptuous of law, reach the place once occupied by Washington and Lincoln? What if neither personal character, nor the play of politics, nor the Constitution itself avail to hold a President to strict accountability?

In the end, the way to control the presidency may have to be not in many little ways but in one large way. In the end, there remains, as Madison said, the decisive engine of impeachment. This is, of course, the instrument provided by the Constitution. But it is an exceedingly blunt instrument. Only once has a President been impeached, and there is no great national desire to go through the experience again.

Yet, for the first time in a century, Americans in the s have to think hard about impeachment, which means that, because most of us flinch from the prospect, we begin to think hard about alternatives to impeachment. One alternative is the censure of the President by the Congress. That was tried once in American history—in , when the Senate censured Andrew Jackson on the ground that, in removing the government deposits from the Second Bank of the United States, he had "assumed upon himself authority and power not conferred by the Constitution and laws, but in derogation of both.

The Senate resolution, he said, charged him with having committed a "high crime. Jackson was plainly right. The slap-on-the-wrist approach to presidential delinquency makes little sense, constitutional or otherwise. There is no halfway house in censure. If a President has committed high crimes and misdemeanors, he should not stay in office. This does not mean, of course, that a fainthearted Congress may not pass a resolution of censure and claim to have done its duty.

But, unless the terms of the resolution make it clear why the President is merely censurable and not impeachable, the action is a cop-out and a betrayal of Congress' constitutional responsibility. Are there other halfway houses? Another proposal seems worth consideration: that is, the removal of an offending President by some means short of impeachment. A resolution calling on the President to resign and passed by an overwhelming vote in each house could have a powerful effect on a President who cares about the Constitution and the country.

If either the President or the Vice President then resigned, the President, old or new, could, under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, nominate a new Vice President, who would take office upon confirmation by both houses of Congress.

If Presidents will not resign of their own volition, can they be forced out without the personal and national ordeal of impeachment and conviction? A proposal advanced in various forms by leading members of the House of Representatives this year contemplates giving Congress authority by constitutional amendment to call for a new presidential election when it finds that the President can no longer perform the functions of his office Representative Bingham or that the President has violated the Constitution Representatives Edith Green and Morris Udall.

The possibility of dissolution and new elections at times of hopeless stalemate or blasted confidence has serious appeal. Dissolution would give a rigid electoral system flexibility and responsiveness. It would permit, in Bagehot's phrase, the timely replacement of the pilot of the calm by the pilot of the storm.

It would remind intractable Congresses that they cannot block Presidents with immunity, as it would remind high-flying Presidents that there are other ways of being shot down besides impeachment. But my instinct is somehow against it. One congressman observes of the Green-Udall amendment that it "would, in effect, take one-half of the parliamentary process and not the entire parliamentary process. The result might well be to alter the balance of the Constitution in unforeseeable and perilous ways.

It might, in particular, strengthen the movement against the separation of powers and toward a plebiscitary presidency. I think that the possibility of inserting dissolution into the American system is worth careful examination.

But digging into the foundations of the state, as Burke said, is always a dangerous adventure. Impeachment, on the other hand, is part of the original foundation of the American state.

The Founding Fathers placed the blunt instrument in the Constitution with the expectation that it would be used, and used most especially against Presidents. Shall any man be above Justice? Above all shall that man be above it, who [as President] can commit the most extensive injustice?

Either of them might be fatal to the Republic. The genius of impeachment lies in the fact that it can punish the man without punishing the office. For, in the presidency, as elsewhere, power is ambiguous: the power, to do good means also the power to do harm, the power to serve the republic also the power to demean and defile it.

The trick is to preserve presidential power but to deter Presidents from abusing that power. Shall any man be above justice? George Mason asked. Obviously not; not even a President of the United States.

But bringing Presidents to justice is not all, that simple. History has turned impeachment into a weapon of last resort—more so probably than the Founding Fathers anticipated; Still, it is possible to exaggerate its impact on the country. It took less than three months to impeach and try Andrew Johnson, and the nation—in a favorite apprehension of as well as of —was not torn apart in the process. Three months of surgery might be better than three years of paralysis. Yet impeachment presents legal as well as political problems.

There is broad agreement, among scholars at least, on doctrine. Impeachment is a proceeding of a political nature, by no means restricted to indictable crimes. On the other hand, it plainly is not to be applied to cases of honest disagreement over national policy or over constitutional interpretation, especially when a President refuses to obey a law that he believes strikes directly at the presidential prerogative.

Impeachment is to be reserved, in Mason's phrase at the Constitutional Convention, for "great and dangerous offenses. The Senate, in trying impeachment cases, is better equipped to be the judge of the law than of the facts.

Company Reg no: VAT reg no Main menu. Subjects Shop Courses Live Jobs board. View shopping cart. View mytutor2u. Account Shopping cart Logout.