On presidential power and the potential to do great harm
by digby
This is a great piece at the Vox blog called Mischiefs of Faction about the power of the presidency which examines the unfortunate tendency among some political scientists to mock those who suggest that a president has any power. We are seeing more of this emerge as the prospect of Trump as president becomes something people are taking seriously.
… The American presidency is not omnipotent or magical. But it is very, very powerful…
They can’t make people do things they don’t want to do, or dislodge entrenched aspects of the system. But presidents still occupy a unique place in the system. They are part of it — they lead the executive branch, where a lot of power resides, much of it bureaucratic and unsexy but nevertheless consequential.
Policy really comes to life in its enforcement. Presidents can use this process in a variety of ways to infuse their own priorities — see executive orders on the “global gag rule” about abortion counseling, for example. Presidents can also empower or strangle agencies, depending on what they think of the mission. Civil rights enforcement has contracted under recent Republican administrations, as has enforcement of environmental regulation. And Obama’s presidency has provided plenty of examples of selective enforcement to support liberal priorities, such as executive action on deporting undocumented immigrants.
Second, although presidents cannot make members of Congress do anything they don’t want to do, they can exercise considerable leadership and influence over the agenda. Obama’s pursuit of health care reform is a good example of this — it’s entirely possible that Democratic members of Congress would have preferred to start with a broader economic bill or environmental issues or something along those lines. Presidents can set the agenda based on personal conviction — but they’re also in a position to look at the big picture of what party members might be prepared to support, or what might fit a national party agenda, while members of Congress have historically had more narrow political incentives. A misfire in this regard can make a difference, too. What if Bush had pursued something other than Social Security reform in 2005?
In addition, presidents, as political theorist Harvey Mansfield famously noted in Taming the Prince, are charged with the necessary discretion to defend and preserve the Constitution, to take care that the laws are faithfully executed — a power that can be read as minimal and even as the president being a “clerk” of Congress — or as a power that, as Mansfield observed, is impossible to fully subsume under the Constitution.
This really makes a difference when it comes to national response to unexpected, unprecedented, and complex situations. Think the Civil War, the Cuban missile crisis, 9/11. These kinds of events are, of course, rare. But the two fairly marginal powers listed above — enforcement and agenda setting — become central in a crisis. The results can be lasting and far-reaching. And the structure of the presidency, set up to enable secrecy and immediate action, makes it very difficult to confine. It’s true, for example, that Bush’s decisions in the Iraq War eventually became unpopular, resulting in Democratic victories in 2006 and a contentious divided government for Bush’s last two years. But nevertheless, we are still contending with the impact of those early decisions.
The piece makes another important point about how a president might function if he or she were not confined by party ties and it isn’t comforting. It’s often the party that keeps a president in check. It concludes with this extremely important observation and one which people should consider very, very strongly when they decide their vote:
One really unpleasant truth that emerges from this is that there’s a certain asymmetry to what presidents can do. A really skilled and brilliant president can’t fix everything. But one with bad judgment can do lasting damage.
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