"Perspectives on Presidential Power"

Louis W. Koenig

in

The Chief Executive



THE DIMINISHED PRESIDENCY

"For all his political prowess, Reagan had to struggle with the heritage of Watergate and Vietnam, which serves to diminish the office's efficacy and impact. Both events seared in the nation's memory the presidency's capacity for wrongdoing and imprudence. The nation's fond recall of heroic presidential figures of the scale of Washington and Lincoln and a procession of lesse but revered successors is now jostled by a sorry memory of presidencies capable of wrongdoing and misjudgement. In the 1970s, when Watergate and Vietnam erupted, another force potent aand independent of them--the reform spirit--ascended. Its hand was felt by two institutions with which the presidency interacts and on whose strength its own wellbeing depends--Congress and the political parties. Thanks to reforms that finally materialized, both Congress and the parties were changed from their historic form and, unfortunately, weakened as policy-producing institutions".

"The major changes buffeting and debilitating Jimmy Carter, Reagan and their successors in this present era of the diminshed presidency include the weakened party system, a rise in congressional power, a resistant bureaucracy, stronger special interests, the mixed blessing of television, the altered candidate selection process, and intractable problems in the country at large".

The Weakened Party System
"A genuine, functioning two-party system is an historic foundation of an effective, responsible presidency...But the major parties have become less cohesive....the proliferating primaries, also the offspring of reform, endlessly demonstrate the vulnerability of the party to challenges of outsiders...".

Congressional Power
"Thanks to the congressinal reforms of the 1970s, power has flowed away from party, from committee chairmen (another bastion of traditional leadership), to subcommittee chairmen, who are both more numerous and more anonymous, and therefore more capable of resisting the legislative party leadership and the President".

"Congress's new assertiveness is also fed by its own expanding bureaucracy, professional and sophisticated, knowledgeable from previous experience in the executive branch, aggressive, and career-minded".

Resistant Bureaucracy
"Congress, the courts, and client interest groups were staging areas of bureaucratic resistance".

Special Interests
"Interest groups have attained a new plateau of efficient, self-interested assertion. ..Political Action committee (PACs), composed predominantly of business organizations, well-financed, politically sophisticated, and deft in grass roots organization, are a growing force the President must reckon with. In the eyes of group leaders, no President can do enough to advance their interests".

The Role of Television
"At best, the age of television is providing a mixed blessing for the presidency. Doubtless television has enhanced the office's position as the nation's supreme political symbol, but in other respects has clearly weakened it....He becomes a national scapegoat even if his powers for dealing with such eventualities are limited and shared with Congress".

The Altered Selection Process
"The proliferation of presidential primaries since the 1970s has turned the selection process into an extended popularity contest among a modest minority of voters who vote in the primaries".

"...Carter, the first President producd by the new selection process, was a nonleader, unskilled in the tasks of consensus-building. Carter initially campaigned for the presidency as an "outsider," untainted by Washington politics, a fresh moral and political force. Even as Presidnt, he continued to maintain that he never, or almost never, considered politics when he made government decisions. This may be a path to sainthood but it does not lead to presidential power".

Intractable Problems
"Intractable problems, by their insatiable demands for attention, crowd other problems off the policy agenda".

"In dealing with intractable problems, the President falls easily into a pattern of flipflops as he struggles to cope. In 1981, Reagan promoted tax reduction to stimulate the economy, contending that it was unnecessary to think of budget deficits. A year later, he pushed through a massive tax increase, citing huge impending deficitis. Another year later, in 1983, he largely ignored the deficit".


CYCLES OF PRESIDENTIAL HISTORY

"Potent forces in American society and culture and in its politics cause fluctuations and discontinuities in the President's role....The volatility of power results partly from the circumstances that it is shared between the executive and Congress. But the precise patterns of sharing are unclear and tentative; and even after nearly two centuries of constitutional practice, they remain largely unpredictable. Power also oscillates because of shifts in public mood that range to a degree seldom matched in other major nations".

"The American system has built-in regulators that assure impermanence in the President's power circumstances. For example, a pyschology born of the separation of powers reinforces fluctuation".

"An historical roadmap of the presidency and its power, then, follows an erratic course of ascents and declines".


THEORIES OF PRESIDENTIAL POWER

Presidential Power As Exaggeration and Myth
"The textbook presidency (Cronin) takes flight from the extraordinary talent and admired works of Franklin Roosevelt. Its scholarship enshrines and institutionalizes his presidency for others to emulate".

"The textbook presidency creates a cult of the presidency that beholds the incumbent as benevolent, omnipotent, omniscent, and highly moral. It inflates presidential competence, expounds the necessity for strong central government, and a strong presidency to run it".

"The textbook presidency is also a recipe for citizen disillusionment. The promise of the office is overstated".

Presidential Power as Persuasion and Bargaining

"Presidential decisions are not self-executing; the Chief Executive can discharge few of them directly. He must influence others to act in ways consistent with his purpose and interests. In actuality, the President has only a highly limited power to command and to employ only as a last result. His most usable power is the power to persuade, or the ablity to convince others that their interests are furthered by what he seeks to do".

"Persuasion is often exercised through bargaining; the presidency contains manipulable resources.... The President fares better in bargaining and persuading if he stands high in public prestige. Crucial is the public's perception of his job performance, the effect of his stewardship on the satisfactions and frustrations of their lives".

"Critiques of Neustadt contend that he overemphasizes bargaining and underemphasizes command".

Presidential Power as Command

"In his study, The American Presidency, Richard Pious contends that the key to understanding presidential power is the constitutional authority the Chief Executive exerts through rules of construction and interpretation of the Constitution's ambiguous language in acting to resolve crises and important policy issues".

"By its nature, the command or constitutional power approach accords low importance to political factors in the President's fortunes such as elections, rallying public opinion, managing the party. Similarly, personality is downgraded, as are skills in persuasion, bargaining, and influence".

Presidential Power as Prerogative

"The political thinker most influential in the Framers' decisions establishing the presidency was the seventeenth century British philosopher John Locke. His classic Second Treatise of Government (1690) sets forth doctrines of executive power and particularly prerogative power, which Presidents throughout the office's history have drawn upon to justify their claims of power".

"Prerogative, Locke explained, is the exercise of power sanctioned by the law of self-preservation. Prerogative is a reserve power "to act according to discretion for the public good, without the prescription of law and sometimes against it". When emergencies overtake nations, Locke noted, and legislatures are too large, unwieldy, and slow to cope with them, the responsible executive must resort to exceptional power".

"In his much discussed study, The Imperial Presidency, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., delineates how Lockean prerogative in the hands of activist Chief Executives vastly aggrandized presidential power and in some cases contributed to gross abuse"