In light of the recent sanctions on Russia passed by Congress that cannot be vetoed by the President — causing some to call it a coup, owing to this denial of one of the President’s foremost responsibilities and powers — it should be clear to all that the presidency is not the dangerous branch of the US government people have long thought it to be. Or, to be more specific, it is no more dangerous than any other branch of the US government.
For a very long time — one might even say to the days of the Founders themselves — the presidency is the branch that has been most held in suspicion. In the late 18th century, an age of kings and emperors, the single most powerful man in government was the obvious choice to place suspicion upon. Given that the Founders were much versed in classical education it seems only natural to presume they were keenly aware of the possibility of a Caesar and felt it the most present danger from within. This strain of thought has continued well into our present. From Lincoln being called “tyrant” to Presidents Bush and Obama being accused of taking too much power for the presidency, the worry that the President might become a dictator has ever been the most pressing concern of skeptics of government besides government as a whole. Amusingly, it is even worrying the leftists now that Trump is president, prompting a better-than-expected article from The New Yorker:
Whether from Bill Clinton’s executive initiatives in the face of Republican control of both houses of Congress, George W. Bush’s wartime assertions of authority, or other actions, the power concentrated in the White House has expanded in each Administration since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s. Some of the increases are barely noticed and usually accepted as benign, like the substantial growth in the number of political appointments the President now makes in the executive branch and in the size of the White House staff. Others are noticed without much understanding about why they are important, like the creation of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which oversees all regulation issued by the executive branch, making the person who leads it what Ackerman called the government’s “supreme regulator.” Others are prominent, like the frequent use of executive orders to govern, which has been controversial off and on since the Second World War.
The transformed Presidency makes it easy, Ackerman writes, for “super-loyalists” of either party to ignore “expert assessments of the facts, or traditional understandings of the law, provided by the agencies.” In theory, Congress and the courts check and balance the President’s exercise of power. In practice, there is strikingly little checking and balancing. From the Presidency of Ronald Reagan until now, the breakdown in this essential mechanism has resulted in executive supremacy and set the stage for the extremist Presidency.
Coming from leftists this is more mild than what one might read from a libertarian (certainly there would be mention at least of Presidents before FDR), but it serves as a general illustration of the sentiments involved. “The Presidency has gotten more powerful, and some day a Hitler will brainwash the masses and so turn the United States into a totalitarian dystopia!” Hyperbolic, perhaps, but not outrageously so. The left lives in eternal fear of a Hitler, while much of the American right lives in fear of so-called totalitarianism.
Why, then, is President Trump so hamstrung? Seemingly at every turn he is blocked from enacting the policies he promised to, in defiance of conventional wisdom about the President’s unchecked power. In January, President Trump signed an order suspending immigration from several countries; the order was promptly stopped by a circuit court judge. His promise to build a wall is trapped in the molasses of Congress. Investigations into the enormous amounts of corruption and illegality during the Obama presidency are slow at best and nonexistent at worst. For a radical candidate, Trump has done very little, and most of that is to do with his stonewalling and foot-dragging by Congress and the Supreme Court. The President, clearly, is not so powerful.
At the same time, previous presidents were able to get away with outrageous violations. From illegal wars to government initiatives presidents have, in recent years, done far more with the executive branch than they are allowed to by law. President Obama, for example, was able to enact DACA and DAPA (illegally allowing the residencies of illegal immigrants) unmolested. Whenever a policy has been bad for Americans, the presidency has been allowed to continue with it without interference. As soon as it seems as if a president might go against the anti-American orthodoxy of the governing elite, he is suddenly smacked with charges that he is overstepping his bounds and acting outside the authority of the Presidency.
Funny how that works, isn’t it?
It is clear that the danger lies not with any one branch but with those actually in power. Damage to the United States has come from all branches in almost equal measure, and each is content to ignore its duties to stop the illegal actions of the others when they drive Progress™ forward. All branches are complicit, a far cry from the days when President Jackson ignored the ruling of the Supreme Court so he could better serve Americans by driving out the Indians.
In short, the US government has broken down, but not in the manner that right-liberals expected it to. Far from a charismatic dictator seizing power, anti-American elements instead seized control of the entirety of the government and work in collusion, conscious or unconscious. Traitors and foreigners (read: natural enemies) sit in the seats of the Senate and the House; they sit on the benches of the Supreme Court, the Circuit Courts, the District Courts; they have occupied the Presidency numerous times and make up the bulk of executive branch employment. It is no longer about the rule of law; law is dead. Its rotting corpse is puppeted, raised from the grave when needed to thwart the Enemies of Progress and just as swiftly reburied when the Agenda can get back on the rails.
Probably about the only thing keeping our governing elite giving even lip service to laws is the fact that they are the only things giving them legitimacy. After all, if laws don’t stop the government trying to drive you extinct for pleasure and profit why should they stop you practicing justice in the halls of government?
Armchair Imperialist 