‘Right-Sizing’ the Presidency

Many Americans are, with good reason, fixated on this year’s presidential election race: After all, the stakes seem especially high. In this case, the drama is actually warranted, because more than others in recent memory, this election raises questions about the future of the presidency itself. How far-reaching is the presidency—and how far-reaching should it be?

It’s all but certain that Donald Trump will return as the Republican nominee, and Trump has expressed a particularly expansive view of what presidential power should look like. While some may balk at such a perspective, the very question of what the presidency encompasses is a rather open one—and it’s one that deserves our attention, looking through the lens of presidential history.

The Constitution and the Gift of George Washington

The presidency is defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution, not Article I. That should tell you something: The framers of the U.S. Constitution believed the legislative branch, not the executive, was the most important branch of government. Legislation was the foundation of power—to make laws was to define the relationship between citizens and their government.

We tend to think of the American Revolution as a revolt against the tyranny of King George III. But the real danger was the abuse of power by Parliament, which Americans felt in the taxes imposed to assert control over the colonies. Hence, the Constitution’s framers believed that the most important task of the document was to clearly delineate what the legislature did, in order to avoid similar abuses of power. Not surprisingly, then, Article I is long and detailed, outlining just what responsibilities belong to the legislative branch—from lawmaking to taxation to commerce regulation.

On the contrary, Article II is remarkably vague about presidential powers. While it includes a lot of information about who can be president, what the requirements for holding office are and how the president is selected, there is relatively little about what the president actually does. It says that he is the head of the executive branch, but it doesn’t define in much detail what that role entails. Additionally, he can make treaties (though this is subject to Senate approval), and “he shall from time to time give the Congress information on the State of the Union” (emphasis is mine).

Why the ambiguity? Given the importance that the founders laid on making sure our government was not tyrannical, it seems to be a glaring mistake not to be more specific about the president’s role. But as presidential scholar Stephen Knott argues, “The founders saw the president as a head of state who stood above the partisan fray, representing the nation as a whole.” However, they knew they had an “ace in the hole,” so to speak. Even though they knew that the office could be abused, they also knew who the first president was going to be—George Washington.

It’s hard to overstate how important and fortuitous it was to have Washington as our first president. The expectation abroad was that America would simply transition from the rule of George III to our very own George I—that Washington would be America’s new king. He was a winning general with an army and officer corps utterly devoted to him. But he surprised many by simply going back to Mount Vernon and giving up power at the conclusion of his second presidential term. (Keep in mind that the two-term limit for presidents wasn’t codified in the Constitution until the 1950s.) In short, America was lucky to have had as its first president the only type of person who can be trusted with power: one willing to give it up.

While Washington had a big hand in establishing the precedents that would guide his successors, the presidency is also contingent on tradition and the way the office has evolved over time. It is emphatically an office that exists in a constitutional system of checks and balances and separation of powers. But especially due to the vague way it’s outlined in the Constitution, the course the presidency has taken throughout American history has changed to fit the individuals who occupied the office.

The 19th Century: Constitutionally Aware Partisans

While there are aspects of Congress’ workings today that would be recognizable to politically observant people of the 1790s, that’s less true of the presidency. If we were to be transported back in time, we’d be struck by just how little the president intruded directly in politics. Think back 200 years: There was no regulatory or welfare state, at least as we identify them today. There was no great national security state. No FBI, no EPA, no Department of Energy. In short, the executive branch did a fraction of what it does today.

But even taking all this into account, the president was still a particularly distant, restrained figure compared to what we see now. Presidents did not comment on day-to-day politics and did little direct campaigning for office—and both these aspects influenced how people conceived of the office. It would have been considered constitutionally incorrect (and unseemly) for the president to directly tell the people’s representatives what to do. The president was first and foremost a constitutional officer, not a tribune of the people.

Presidential speeches were usually celebratory of the nation, usually nonpartisan or bipartisan. The Gettysburg Address is a perfect example. There is no partisan rancor; indeed, political parties are not mentioned. Though it champions the idea of a non-slave union, it is devoid of policy specifics, instead couching its arguments in terms of the greater good. When presidents deviated from these norms, they were swiftly criticized. For example, prior to the 1866 midterm elections, Andrew Johnson gave a series of public speeches for his deconstructionist policies and in favor of candidates he supported. This so-called “swing around the circle” tour did him no favors: Johnson was criticized for “draggling… [his] garments in the muddy gutters of political vituperation.”

This isn’t to say the presidents of the past lacked power. However, the methods by which they generally exercised that power were much different from those used today. A lot of that has to do with the relative strength of political parties. Parties arose, in part, to get things done—and as the 19th century arrived and progressed, strong presidents like Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln became insiders who worked the party apparatus they controlled or, at least, heavily influenced. They engaged in, to a certain extent, a kind of “public dance”: While these 19th-century presidents identified with a party and were powerful party leaders behind the scenes, they were also constrained to act as nonpartisans (or at most, weak partisans) in public.

Thus, the party system that empowered presidents also limited them as well. While a president was the most important member of a political party, he was also part of a team—first among equals, to be sure, but among equals nonetheless. This also reinforced the system of separation of powers: There were other party leaders with a base of power in the House or Senate that could not be bossed around by the president. The president had to rule by persuasion.

The 20th Century: The Presidency on the Grow

From the time of the country’s founding, the president mostly played second fiddle to Congress. With the arrival of the 20th century, though, three things conspired to transform the office into what we recognize today:

Presidents began to take a more active and direct role in influencing the public. When Thomas Jefferson had an opinion on policy, he made his views known to party leaders in Congress over a quiet dinner at the White House. Contrast that approach with Theodore Roosevelt’s: As the “bully pulpit” pioneer, TR actively made his views publicly known and, more importantly, he succeeded in ways that 19th-century presidents could not. In 1905, in his State of the Union address, Roosevelt called for enhanced powers for the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate railroad shipping rates.

There is nothing remarkable about that—presidents had always used the State of the Union, a constitutionally mandated responsibility of the office, to call for certain policies. The House quickly passed the Hepburn bill; however, it ran into trouble in the more conservative Senate. At this point, it appeared that Roosevelt had given up on the bill and went on a long summer vacation. Instead, this “vacation” was really a long series of public speeches rousing public support for the reform.

Additionally, technological advances in communication made it easier to follow and report on presidential actions. By Theodore Roosevelt’s day, the rise of a true mass media had finally happened. It was now easier to produce inexpensive national magazines—that was not the case even a generation earlier. With these innovations, the president now had the means to talk directly to and with the American people, matching the evolution in the public’s expectations for the presidency.

From the telegraph to radio, to television and now social media, the president can communicate with the American people informally, frequently—even on a momentary basis. This creates connection between the president and the people in ways that would seem both extraordinary and dangerous to the Founding Fathers. It is almost inevitable that the president would start to lean toward being the “tribune” of the people that the framers were most concerned about.

The federal government began to do a lot more. Starting with TR and Woodrow Wilson’s presidencies, the federal government began to take a more active role in regulating the economy. Then with the Great Depression and the radical transformation of the economy, Franklin Roosevelt further expanded the federal government’s role. Although an earlier generation of progressives had championed a stronger national state to regulate the economy, this reached fruition under FDR. With extensive banking reforms and the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Roosevelt extended the regulatory reach of the federal government. With the creation of Social Security, welfare and unemployment benefits, the New Deal also redistributed wealth to fight poverty in new ways.

All of these measures brought the federal government more deeply and more directly into Americans’ lives. The 1936 election was largely seen as a referendum on many of these reforms, and with Roosevelt’s overwhelming re-election, the new relationship between the federal government and the citizenry was ratified.

The U.S. truly became a world power. The president was always given great deference when it came to foreign affairs. But the fact is that for much of its history, the U.S. was a weak global power, distant from the action. With World War I and even more so with World War II, the U.S. fully entered the world stage. This made the president more important than before: One of the few very clear powers granted to the president under the Constitution is command of the armed forces. When the military consisted of a few thousand soldiers and a few ships, that really didn’t amount to much. But today, the U.S. has the most powerful military in world history. Since World War II, the nation has been deeply involved in affairs around the world—and the U.S. president is the de facto leader of the broad Western coalition of powers.

The Presidency Today

One major result of these technological and institutional evolutions is that Americans today have extremely high expectations about whoever holds the office. Polls show that Americans expect presidents to solve almost any problem the country faces. George W. Bush was punished for the federal government’s weak response to Hurricane Katrina, for example, when earlier generations would have accepted the storm as an “act of God” and expected little to nothing from the federal government in response.

The president had been viewed as a protector of the constitutional order, but by the 20th century, the president became seen as the “problem-solver-in-chief.” We now routinely poll how well the president is doing on a wide range of issues and in numerous public policy arenas. I often wonder how a 19th-century American would even process a polling question such as, “How well is the president managing the economy?”

There are at least two reasons for this change. First, it’s part of a self-perpetuating cycle: When a president is expected to do more and says he will do more, he then seeks more power to achieve those expectations. Second, as the national and world economies have become more complex and interconnected, we’ve looked to government to manage that system. Since the executive branch had been given so much power, the president had a full arsenal of tools to achieve his goals.

Furthermore, presidential candidates became increasingly prone to making big promises to the American people. Maybe one of the best examples of this is John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address where Kennedy pledged, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” These words constituted a call for concerted action led by the president. One cannot imagine a 19th-century president saying such a thing.

From managing the Cold War to landing a man on the moon (as promised by Kennedy and achieved in less than a decade), the nation accomplished its goals as laid out by the president. However, that “golden era” for presidents foundered on the rocks of Vietnam, Watergate and the oil shocks of the 1970s. These events seem to have hardened a more cynical view of the presidency. Furthermore, polls for a generation have shown a lack of trust in the major institutions of government, and that has largely worsened with every passing year. FDR’s approval only fell below 50% once in his presidency; Biden and Trump both fell well below that mark for much of their presidencies.

In the face of a widening gap between what we expect of our presidents and the reach of presidential power, we need to recalibrate the office and our views of it. There is no going back to the 19th century or even the early 1960s. So how should we think about the presidency today?

We have to first remember that despite all his power, the president is still constrained by existing in a constitutional order with two other powerful branches. Congress matters, and the courts matter. Americans seem to frequently forget that, despite the lessons we got in school about separation of powers and checks and balances. Increasingly, many Americans believe in, as Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan put it, the Green Lantern theory of the presidency—“the belief that the president can achieve any political or policy objective if only he tries hard enough or uses the right tactics.”

But the simple fact is that the president has to prioritize and still has to work with Congress and hope the courts don’t say what he does is unconstitutional. Every president faces unexpected world events—from global pandemics to invasions to terrorist attacks—and so it’s easy to see how he cannot deliver on every promise. These challenges are made more problematic by the demands of party activists and ideological purists who see compromise as unacceptable. It certainly doesn’t help that the partisan rhetoric on both sides has grown more heated over the past 20 years.

What we need is recognition that the president is not (and cannot be) the solver of all problems, and that compromise is not a dirty word. In some ways, Joe Biden has done well on this score. While many Americans are certainly uncomfortable with Biden’s liberal agenda and his desire to use government power, it should be somewhat reassuring that Biden has shown quite a willingness to work with Congress.

Certainly some of this is due to political expediency—Biden probably wants to appear as a sensible moderate, willing to compromise, as a contrast with Trump. This might very well appeal to political independents and those in the middle of the spectrum. But I suspect a fair amount of this reflects Biden’s own long career in Congress. He has a natural affinity for working with the legislative branch of government. He is the consummate political insider, marked by a career that started in the early 1970s. And despite a great deal of anger from far-left activists, he’s displayed a comfort with compromise.

While Biden did not achieve passage of his early Build Back Better plan, Congress eventually passed the Inflation Reduction Act. Throughout this process, Biden continually endeavored to set broad parameters while letting Congress work out the details. This created a great deal of Sturm und Drang in the moment and progressive fury at Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin. But in the long run, Biden has shown a continuing willingness to come back for half a loaf—this is probably the result of temperament but also a long political life shaped by the way Congress negotiates compromises. He has often shown deference to congressional leaders of his own party, and he has also indicated an openness to working across the aisle. This does not play well with ideological purists or cable news and social media ideologues. But compromise is still the hallmark of politics in a democracy.

The real problem is that 2024’s leading Republican candidate, Donald Trump, has taken the opposite approach. His frustrations, and those of his followers, have led to the demand for more presidential power if elected. His advisers are planning sweeping changes in the way the bureaucracy functions. They want to fill the upper echelons of the civil service with Trump loyalists. This would mark a return to the more partisan bureaucracy of the 19th and early 20th centuries—a time known for a great deal of corruption at all levels of government. Trump’s desire is to return to the spoils systems that America started to reject in the late 19th century.

Even more disturbingly, he has increasingly used the rhetoric of dictatorship. His call to investigate opponents using the Department of Justice, to create large camps for detained immigrants, and to possibly deploy troops on U.S. soil suggests that a second Trump administration would indeed be an authoritarian Green Lantern, to modify Nyhan’s theory. Trump’s recent statement that he would not come to the aid of NATO allies if threatened by Russia is shocking not only in its very stance, but also because it’s an example of a president threatening to destroy a bipartisan policy that is over 70 years old. Combine that statement with his suggestion that he would deport millions of migrants on day one of his administration, and it’s clear that Trump has a view of the office as expansive as any past president—though with markedly different priorities. He does not mention any consultation with Congress in making these promises. This strikes at the heart of a constitutional system predicated on an executive with some sense of limits.

This is emphatically what we don’t need—and what the presidency doesn’t need. The founders took a calculated risk in creating an office that was vague in its powers. Presidents have sometimes shrunk from the moment and failed to exercise power or make good judgments (James Buchanan before the Civil War is a good example). Other times, presidents have risen to the occasion to make bold steps into the “silences of the Constitution” to employ presidential power. Lincoln did this in the 1860s, and FDR did similar things in the 1930s and ’40s. And many of us do call Lincoln and FDR great.

However, even in the cases of Lincoln and FDR, these were men who worked within institutions. They respected their parties and were constrained by them. They also worked with Congress and, though navigating the legislative branch proved frustrating to them at times, they treated the legislature with at least grudging respect. Under these terms, the office, even in extraordinary times, was still “right-sized,” if you will. This reminds us that presidents are not dictators and at their best, American presidents lead by persuasion, not by command. This is the genius of the American political system and the office rooted in the traditions first created by George Washington—and it must be preserved as we work to define an evolving presidency in the future.