Weekend Economists Kickoff the Season, September 6-8, 2013

[Demeter]

31. The Hands-Tied Presidency By SAM TANENHAUS

Last edited Sat Sep 7, 2013, 10:01 PM - Edit history (1)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/sunday-review/the-hands-tied-presidency.html?pagewanted=print

AS the debate on the Syria intervention began in Congress last week, some wondered why President Obama, who has been frustrated repeatedly by Republican legislators, would risk being thwarted yet again and possibly jeopardize the ability of future presidents to pursue ambitious foreign policy objectives. In explaining his decision, Mr. Obama stressed constitutional imperatives. “I’m the president of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy,” he said, adding that he must respect “members of Congress who want their voices to be heard.”

But Mr. Obama might also have been acknowledging something else: that he holds office at a time when the presidency itself has ceded much of its power and authority to Congress. His predecessors found this, too. Bill Clinton discovered it after the 1994 election, when Newt Gingrich, the architect of the Republican victory in the House, briefly seemed the most powerful politician in the land. George W. Bush discovered it 10 years later when he claimed a mandate after his re-election, only to see two of his prized programs — privatizing Social Security and immigration reform — wither amid resistance in Congress. This is the history Mr. Obama has inherited. The major accomplishment of his first term, his health care reform bill, owed less to his leadership, perhaps, than to that of Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker in 2009-10. In his second term Mr. Obama effectively rallied public support for gun-law reform, and yet the bill was defeated in the Senate.

The perception that this is a time of diminishing presidential power has even made its way into popular culture. A decade ago, television’s top political drama was “The West Wing,” with its idealistic president and his smart and hyper-energetic staff who charged through the hallways and camped in their offices at night. Contrast this with the signature political fictions of the current moment. In the HBO comedy “Veep,” the humor flows from the mordant premise that the neurotic, bumbling vice president, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, is “a heartbeat away” from the White House (whose occupant is all but invisible). In the Netflix melodrama “House of Cards,” the president is a bystander of his own administration. It’s run instead by the conniving House majority whip, played by Kevin Spacey, who in one story line exerts his power in a marathon “mark up” session in which House members insert pet provisions in a bill.

Divided government has been a staple of American politics for many years, and Mr. Obama, a former professor of constitutional law, needs no education in the system of checks and balances. But analysts usually emphasize other factors. In ideological terms there is a Tea Party-caffeinated insurgency within the House Republican caucus. In personal terms, there is Mr. Obama’s inability to charm adversaries as Ronald Reagan did. And while the executive branch’s role in national security has grown mightily in recent decades, Mr. Obama’s decision to go to Congress arguably shows a greater deference on war and peace than any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. BUT what if the problem isn’t a matter of ideology or personality? What if it is structural and institutional? This is the case some political theorists have been making for many years. “The actual form of our present government is simply a scheme of congressional supremacy,” one close student of politics, Woodrow Wilson, wrote in his book “Congressional Government,” published in 1885, when Wilson was not yet 30, and when a succession of weak presidents — Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, Chester A. Arthur — seemed unable to master the uses of power. Wilson did not fault individual presidents. Instead he pointed to the weakened condition of the presidency itself. “Its power has waned,” Wilson wrote. “And its power has waned because the power of Congress has become predominant.” As the nation got bigger, so did the House of Representatives. But it also became more atomized. Its “doings seem helter-skelter, and without comprehensible rule,” Wilson wrote. The “almost numberless bills that come pouring in” were parceled among 47 “standing committees,” with the lines of jurisdiction hopelessly tangled. No one could shape a coherent vision of it — except, possibly, the president. He alone was elected by and accountable to the whole of the country, Wilson argued, and so was rightfully the “unifying force in our complex system, the leader of both party and nation.” Thus the idea of the presidential “mandate,” a principle that “cannot be found in the Framers’ conception of the Constitution,” as the political scientist Robert Dahl noted in 1990. Wilson’s own presidency, as the historian Jill Lepore pointed out last week in The New Yorker, can be interpreted as an attempt to put his theory into practice, and he too was unable to realize much of what he envisioned, though his two terms represent the fist modern instance of the “imperial presidency.”

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PERSONALLY, I'M JUST FINE WITH A HANDS-TIED PRESIDENT. WISH THEY INCLUDED A GAG, SOMETIMES, TOO. IMPERIAL FOPS ARE NOT AMERICAN.