As we have spent a whole semester specifically looking at the presidency and have been writing about it on our blogs, I find that there is quite a lot that I have learned, quite a bit to reflect upon. I thought the class would be interesting but I didn’t really think that it would be as intriguing as I found it to be. I hadn’t realized that there was so much drama and struggle in creating the presidency.
Starting out the class, it surprised me by how much focus there was on limiting the president’s power as opposed to granting him enough. I hadn’t realized that the main concern was to avoid making the president resemble a monarch. In certain aspects, it seems frustrating that his power is so limited as compared to a monarch, but it makes sense when I look back to the situation that the founders were in, attempting to avoid monarchical and perhaps tyrannical rule. Nothing like this had ever been created before, so I think that it speaks volumes when we look at the U.S. today and see how the presidency has endured, without having so much power that it leads to a tyrannical ruler while at the same time having enough to accomplish the things that are necessary.
The fight between Congress and the president intrigued me as well and in fact did so enough that I wrote a blog post on it. When looking at how the legislature was designed to be dominant, and in control of what legislation is passed, it is interesting to see that that has changed to be quite different than it once was. Part of that I think is the expansion and the addition of states to our Union and the growth of Congress which makes it more difficult I think that choose a clear direction and to follow a clear vision as there are many different people, all fighting for the needs of their own constituents. It is interesting to me that Congress once upon a time, used to control who was nominated for president and seemed to effectively control the presidency and then to compare that to presidencies like that of FDR when he was able to do whatever he wanted because he was in control of Congress. Since the founders left so much open to interpretation, I think that it is only natural that things like this happen.
It is fascinating to see how the president’s power has expanded and contracted over time based on the circumstances and the person who occupies it. I definitely think that the person in office can have a strong effect on how much power the position has and will have when he leaves office. For example, Harding thought the president should have less power and wanted to pull it back to what it had been in the 19th century. And then there are presidents like Abraham Lincoln and FDR who took as much power as the needed in order to accomplish their goals. Arguably, Lincoln may have crossed the line into doing things that weren’t constitutional, but he was doing it for the sake of the country and was able to bring the Union back together. In that case, it is likely that the founders would have been horrified. FDR’s amount of power may have even been too much for the founders as Jefferson thought that buying the Louisiana Territory was out of his constitutional power.
In looking at the presidency now, and the amount of power that Obama has as compared to what the office looked like at its creation, I think that it is obvious that Obama has much more power than George Washington did. Although Washington was probably better liked, for better or worse, the office of the presidency has changed to grant the president more power. I think (and the founders may disagree with me) that this change is acceptable. Life and change was slower 200 years ago, and was expected to be slow. Today, people expect things to be done quickly so that they can get on with their lives and do their own things. People don’t like waiting. With this I think goes the expansion of the president’s power. People want rapid change done now and in order to do this, and to keep the president effective, I think an increase in power is needed. I think that this tension between the legislature and the president will always exist, but the nature of those tensions will vary based on who is in office and the time and state that our country is in.
