Tag Archives: presidential overreach

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A Runaway Presidency

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Our present experience suggests that the nation’s founders failed to prevent what they feared. Why were they so eager to pretend Britain was a top-down monarchy?

At the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia the colonists’ representatives reveled in anti-monarchist thought. The founding fathers wanted to create a way to avoid a monarchy, beginning the work of establishing a government to be shared by three co-equal branches. They were certain there would be no equivalent to King George III in what would become the federal district established along the Potomac. John Adams was among the first to propose the three-way power sharing we are supposed to have today. So there is a dark irony in the fact that we now have—more or less–what he and his deliberators in 1776 wanted to avoid.  And though it is not fair to simply cast blame for a lack of foresight at this and the later 1787 Constitutional convention, it is clear that the founders’ vision of distributed power failed to adequately account for the possibility of a runaway presidency.

Today evidence of the near-collapse of legislative and judicial functions at the federal level is all around us. One party controls all three branches of government. Indeed, we have a single-party controlling majorities in both houses of Congress who functions more like spectators than participants in the Trump circus. One can wonder if those folks in the majority should be paying Broadway theater prices for the seats they occupy as passive observers to the dismemberment of the federal government. The courts are more active, but mostly delay but not change the Trump agenda. And both lack any constitutional teeth to punish the executive bureaucracy for overreach, leaving the Presidency with increasingly unchecked power. The rarely used “guard rooms” in the basement of the Capitol are a reminder of the limited power of Congress to enforce anything it does. As to the judiciary, “court shopping” and long appeals processes today endlessly postpone reckonings for most of the wealthy who are facing civil or criminal actions.

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In hindsight, there should be more direct constitutional checks on the abuse and compliance enforcement acts undertaken by the misnamed ‘administrative’ branch of government.

Only the Commander-in-Chief has broad authority to oversee what has evolved from administrative to policing agencies. They range from the military services to the  F.B.I., to HHS. For example, in a break with precedent Donald Trump is using the Department of Justice to pursue his own urges for punishment and retribution. Ditto for federally supported arts, education, and research units in every corner of the nation. Article II of the constitution is mostly silent on  limiting these magnifications of power.

In short, the nation’s founders failed to prevent what they feared. We have a President who behaves like a king. Moreover, in hindsight it is obvious that founders like James Madison knew that Britain’s civil life even in the  mid-1700s did not amount to a simple monarchy. The House of Commons evolved much earlier, in the 13th and 14th centuries. Even a cursory reading of British history yields the conclusion that an active parliamentary system in Britain was established well before America declared her independence. The founders would have known about the power of Sir Robert Walpole, who dominated the political scene in London and became the first British Prime Minister. They had the example of an emerging parliamentary system of government if they wanted to consider it.

Why were the founders so eager to pretend Britain was a top-down monarchy? It turns out that scapegoating to the mentally challenged king was perhaps a bit too easy. I have new sympathies for the loyalists within the colonies who were willing to stake their futures on British rule and the advantages of a parliamentary system over a republic. Even within a titular monarchy, parliamentary governments have advantages and flexibilities that are lost in republics like ours which thwart direct elections and are slow to adapt to changing political circumstances. Our system leaves disastrous parties and our own mentally challenged Presidents in control for far too long. And so we stagnate. Constitutionally, and when a political party is complicit, we have no viable pathways to “no confidence” votes against a leader that could pull us out of our civil miseries.

A Heritage Script, but the Performance is all Trump

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Trump’s actions seem to come with little input or deliberation.

Descriptions of the various forms of presidential leadership usually include several basic patterns. A President can lead by deliberating with various stakeholders in and out of government. It is clear The Heritage Foundation headquartered a short walk from the Capitol almost always has ear of this president. But is doubtful their ideas were subject to much presidential deliberation. Or a leader can make a concerted effort to shape public opinion. We have been reminded recently that President Carter employed this form repeatedly in messages, arguing to the nation to be more frugal and conservation minded. Alternatively, a president can demonstrate intent by acting on his or her own ideas. In the words of political scientist James David Barber, he or she can “show an orientation toward productiveness as a value,” flooding the daily news agenda with gestures of decisiveness. George W. Bush liked to use the location that he was “the decider:” a single-minded leader with little patience for parsing various other views.

Trump is definitely not the West Wings’ Jeb Bartlett, testing ideas with insiders and outsiders from morning to night. Instead, proposals like taking over Panama or invading Iceland, you will pardon the pun, seem half-baked: made mostly in private, but announced with calculated theatrics. The theatre of stale “manly” declarations is his rhetorical method, and about 25 years out of date. The result is that we might get better outcomes with a throw of some dice.

One could fairly ask how the preposterous idea of taking over a foreign land was not fully studied and discussed by security analysts, both sides of Congress, military leaders, and, most egregiously, the effected governments themselves. After all, these decisions involve sovereign states that were–not long ago–our allies. Ditto on unilaterally renaming Denali, the beautiful word indigenous and more recent residents of Alaska prefer for this grand North American mountain. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska (R) disagrees with Trump’s decision. “You can’t improve upon the name that Alaska’s Koyukon Athabascans bestowed on North America’s tallest peak.” Obviously, place names of indigenous Americans rightfully figure in every corner of the nation. Politico suggests he is just getting started on a binge of unilateral name-changes. Who knows what is in store for the residents of Minnesota, Montana, or New York?

Aside from the blunt instrument of random tariffs, which has all of the grace of shooting out the neighbor’s windows, the single biggest marvel of executive overreach is his decision to rename internationally recognized name for the Gulf of Mexico. He seems uninterested in Mexico’s or Cuba’s views or, more significantly, the weight of history and tradition that governs long-established geographical features. Changing the name of an international body of water is roughly the equivalent of announcing that Florida will henceforth be known as Swamplandia. Floridians might have other ideas. The U.S. Board on Geographic Names would normally vet name changes. But even a leader who craves the appearance of authority should know that sometimes ‘saying it doesn’t make it so.’

In the parlance of decision-making theory, these are all “low knowledge/non-incremental” changes with important ramifications that reach far beyond what the impulsive Donald Trump envisions. Consultation with effected parties on these decisions appears to have been minimal.

Students of how decisions are made note that non-incremental changes preceded by little deliberation represent the least desirable path to change. It’s a theatrical style of leadership more at home in movie script than in our elaborately interconnected world. We now must wait with our former friends for the unintended consequences to roll in.