Presidential Power and the Constraints of State Authority

Introduction: The Presidency and the Party System

The formation of the party system that today endows the United States with its leadership, its philosophy, and its cultural identity would be the result of a natural process. Given the diversity of ideals and realities facing the Founding Fathers, these parties would form around the need to represent such circumstances in the drafting of a Constitution, a form of government, and protections for the rights of the people. The achievement of this balance would be shaped by two distinct views on how America should be led. On one side, those who projected the need for a nation with strong, central elected leadership would support the empowerment of an executive who would gradually experience an upward trend in powers and flexibility. On the opposite side of the divide, leaders speaking on behalf of the general American public feared the implications of a presidential leader without sufficient accountability to larger forces and systems in play.

At its heart, this debate extends from a framework of classical political philosophy. The point-and-counterpoint process that drove the evolution of the constitutional democracy was not necessarily a clash of two opposing forces, but rather a reflection of the ideological discourse that existed along a continuum extending to the first stirrings for independence. This phenomenon helped yield compromise in an otherwise structuralist setting, with the institutional principles of the Federalists being checked by the ideological interests represented by the Anti-Federalists. Today, with the Bush administration having used numerous opportunities to expand the reach of its own authority, the issue of presidential entitlement is once again under heavy debate.

This debate is highlighted by the prescient 1989 text by William Grover entitled The President as Prisoner, which uses the Carter and Reagan administrations as respective case studies to argue that the president's authority is most directly limited not by the will of the people but by the priorities of the state. Indeed, as we will consider in this account, the president is something of a custodian of the office, appealing to a mode of stewardship that effectively measures the will of the public against the complex pressures imposed by preexistent questions, challenges, and situations.

Grover's Structural Framework of Presidential Authority

For many, it is challenging to dismiss the premise that the president is a leader of unrestrained entitlement. The inherent gravitas of the position seems to imply a degree of power unmatched elsewhere in government. However, it is Grover's argument that in fact the president steps into an intensely complex and entrenched scenario, where far too many matters of widespread and popular importance are already patterned to a certain end. The notion of what a president is, and how he might be expected to respond to a host of preexistent situations, has seen a fundamental divide where the distinguishing factor is the president's acceptance of or resistance to the limitations placed upon his office by circumstance.

The type of presidency that America experiences is categorized along these lines. Each presidency either comports with the presumption of the state's overarching influence or works to define itself according to actions that diverge from these pressures. The approach taken from this point of division will have a determinant impact on how we might understand a specific presidency. According to Grover, "used in this deeper sense of the terms, structural analysis of the presidency draws much of its sustenance from the large body of work concerned with the theory of the state" (p. 9). This is to say that a president's ideology and presumptions, while relevant to approach and presentation, will not play a part in defining a president's key issues. These will emerge through the cycles of history, with the president occupying the office only as long as the electoral process dictates his entitlement to do so. In the course of that duration, it will be his duty to connect his ideological orientation — and that of his supporters — to the issues and structures defining the state itself.

Cold War Policy and the Limits of Presidential Ideology

When we consider such issues as Cold War policy — a dominant matter for presidents occupying the office between World War II and the end of the Reagan era — we note that philosophical distinctions creating a vast chasm between figures such as Eisenhower and Kennedy, or Carter and Reagan, were nonetheless bridged by their collective attention to the issues of Soviet power, global nation-building, and the provision of national security in a time of great rhetorical conflict. For all occupying presidents during this period, the public's obsessive attention to the communist threat, the military demands that required American forces across a wide array of theaters, and the systemic internal pressures from non-executive departments such as State, Defense, and Intelligence collectively dictated a common ground among political figures who were otherwise bitter enemies.

Indeed, as the Grover text suggests and as retrospective history confirms, the Vietnam War was an issue that belonged to multiple presidencies, all of which sought to balance the sense of individualized power in combating global threats against an awareness of America's prevailing sentiments concerning the country's role in the world. Ultimately, while Vietnam became a heavy burden for Presidents Johnson and Nixon, Kennedy's assassination relieved him of this onus. The inevitability of America's Cold War policy was larger and more determinant than any one presidency. In many ways, this premise helps to reinforce Grover's main argument: that each president is inherently formed by the issues he inherits.

Conclusion: The President as Custodian of Office

The president is something of a custodian of the office, appealing to a mode of stewardship that effectively measures the will of the public against the complex pressures imposed by preexistent questions, challenges, and situations. Grover's framework reminds us that regardless of ideology, each president must ultimately reckon with the entrenched demands of the state — a reality that defines and delimits executive power far more than any individual leader's ambitions or mandate ever could.

References

Grover, W. (1989). The President as Prisoner. Willis Monie Books.