Power And It's Corrupting Influence

This needs mentioning not just for GW and his cadre of Constitution flouting brethren. It goes way back to FDR, Lincoln and Grant. Presidents with agendas that diametrically oppose their nation's desire (i.e. 1940's America wanted nothing to do with the war, so FDR had to foment issues to plunge America into it) need to be taken care of rather quickly.
As I get older, I find from local politics to the national stage, the guys who REALLY REALLY want to be in charge probably shouldn't be.


How U.S. Presidents Make End-Runs Around Hapless Congress
By Michael Glennon
April 9 (Bloomberg) -- The Bush-Cheney White House isn't the first one to treat Congress with contempt. Its bitter disputes with Capitol Hill over war funding, U.S. attorneys and recess appointments (to name just the most recent examples) are part of a long, troubling history of executive-branch high- handedness.
As Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg show in ``Presidential Power: Unchecked and Unbalanced,'' the ``imperial presidency'' (the late Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s term) has been upending the balance of powers set forth in the Constitution for the past century. The courts have usually gone along, while Congress has fought a losing battle to reverse the erosion of its authority.
It may not look that way today, with assertive Democrats finally attempting, however haphazardly, to challenge the Bush administration. To Crenson and Ginsberg, though, we've been here before. In their unsettling portrait of American politics, the presidency (scandals, impeachments and unpopular wars notwithstanding) relentlessly amasses power, Congress retreats and democracy suffers.
The first half of ``Presidential Power'' is a fact-filled history of these various power shifts since the earliest days of the republic. The authors -- political scientists at Johns Hopkins University -- write in a sterile, academic style, which makes this long survey slow going.
Hacks, Superstars
One of their themes is that ``the kinds of presidents we get depend on the processes by which we get them.'' Nineteenth- century chief executives were often pliant underachievers handpicked by powerful party bosses. But by the early 20th century, ties between candidates and parties were fraying, and would-be presidents began to mount White House bids on their own. These ambitious free agents, the authors argue, wanted to make history, and to do that they needed power.
Theodore Roosevelt pioneered the media leak. Woodrow Wilson invented the news conference. Herbert Hoover used government commissions to make end-runs around Congress.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the acknowledged master of the power grab. Yet the authors give him a pass, because ``FDR was popular and his tenure was a time of domestic and international crises that demanded centralization.''
Fair enough. They go on to argue that those extraordinary conditions have never recurred -- not in the Cold War and certainly not in the current war on terror. The heart of the debate over presidential power is the constitutional right to declare war. The Constitution plainly grants it to Congress, while awarding control over foreign policy to the president -- and there's the rub.
War-Making Powers
The authors' discussion of the president's war-making powers is their best and most readable chapter. In wartime, they explain, Congress has usually been willing to give the president a free hand, at least at first.
Ever protective of their prerogatives, presidents haven't asked for a formal declaration of war since World War II. As a result, ``even when presidents sought congressional assent to the use of force, there was a tendency to view this as a courtesy rather than a constitutional requirement.''
The 1973 War Powers Resolution tried to reassert a measure of legislative-branch control after the public turned against the Vietnam War. The resolution required congressional approval for military forays lasting longer than 90 days. It was fully observed just once, in 1975.
Since then, presidents have devised ways to ignore congressional antiwar pressure. They've insulated foreign policy from popular criticism by introducing the all-volunteer Army and adopting military tactics aimed at minimizing casualties. Typically, presidents have sought congressional approval (but not authorization) while making it clear that they intended to intervene regardless -- in Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Kuwait, the former Yugoslavia and, of course, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Signing Statements
Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton all used signing statements to skirt congressional mandates on national- security and domestic issues, a practice the current Bush administration has raised to new heights: In more than 500 of them, it has signaled which legislative provisions it will abide by and which it will flout.
Congress isn't powerless. It can hold public hearings; it can refuse to fund programs or initiatives. But it seldom musters the will to do so. It's hard for 535 people to reach consensus, and these days legislators are more concerned with getting re-elected than with the prestige and authority of their institution.
The authors have little sympathy for them. They reserve it for democracy and for the citizens it's supposed to serve.
``Presidential Power: Unchecked and Unbalanced'' is published by Norton (416 pages, $27.95).