News Analysis
The Hands-Tied Presidency
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/sunday-review/the-hands-tied-presidency.html
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 first modern instance of the “imperial presidency.”
Tellingly, when Wilson
set forth his vision of the modern presidency, he drew parallels with
scientific theory. The “mechanical” view of congressional politics originated
in the ideas of Newton, while a more
sophisticated presidential politics reflected the adaptive, evolutionary system
of Darwin. When
Wilson made this comparison, in 1908, many
Americans resisted Darwin’s
theories, as indeed many still do.
And this, in turn, points to a fault line in our politics
that has less to do with constitutional disagreements than with cultural ones.
It is not surprising that Wilson
has become the historical bête noire of conservatives in the Obama years.
Critics ranging from Glenn Beck to Paul Ryan have said Wilson led the nation
away from its original basis — a self-governing citizenry guided by common
sense and represented by legislators attuned to local concerns — and replaced
it with a regime of policy experts “devoted to high principle,” as the
political theorist Willmoore Kendall put it in 1960.
These tensions have resurfaced today. While Mr. Obama and
his secretary of state, John Kerry, have painted the Syria intervention in grand moral
terms, skeptical legislators in both parties say their constituents are asking
practical questions about its cost and consequences. And they may have history
on their side.
After all, it was devotion to high principle that gave us Vietnam and Iraq.