Theories of the Presidency

I’m trying to imagine the idea of Taft and Roosevelt being good friends. The book says they were, but it seems like a very unequal pairing. Taft would so have been the Robin to Roosevelt’s Batman. You just don’t think of TR having friends so much as…lackeys. Sycophants.

Unsurprisingly, the vastly different personalities of these two men carried over into their theories of executive authority. Roosevelt’s conception of the president’s power was known as stewardship theory. Here’s a quote from his autobiography that sums it all up:

I declined to adopt the view that what was imperatively necessary for the nation could not be done by the President unless he could find some specific authorization for it.  My belief was that it was not only his right but his duty to do anything that the needs of the nation demanded unless such action was forbidden by the Constitution or by the laws. . . .  I did not usurp power, but I did greatly broaden the use of executive power. . . .  I acted. . . whenever and in whatever manner was necessary, unless prevented by direct constitutional or legislative prohibition. . . .  The course I followed [was] of regarding the Executive as subject only to the people, and, under the Constitution, bound to serve the people affirmatively in cases where the Constitution does not explicitly forbid him to render the service.

Theodore Roosevelt  [The Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt (NY: Scribner’s, 1913).]

So, in short, Roosevelt thought he could do anything the constitution didn’t explicitly bar him from doing. This argument seems a little like a kid telling his mom that she didn’t say he couldn’t have ten cookies, so he assumed it would be ok. I admire the audacity of it though.

Taft’s argument, like Taft, was much wimpier. (Does his theory even have a name? Is it just the Whig theory? Well, it lost out anyway, so I guess it doesn’t matter much.) Taft believed that a President’s powers were limited to those explicitly stated in the Constitution. If it wasn’t an enumerated power, then it wasn’t any sort of power at all. This version of the Presidency is much more constrained and circumscribed; it’s a theory of the presidency that sees Congress, rather than the executive, as the dominant branch.

I’m a little torn on what I think about these two theories. Rarely is there a topic on which I haven’t developed an annoyingly strong opinion, but this one has me at a loss. I think I’m just too biased. I remember someone in our class saying that he supported Roosevelt’s theory when he liked the president and Taft’s when he didn’t, and that’s exactly how I feel about it. Such arbitrariness is not exactly a strong basis for building a theory of the presidency. The rules have to apply to everyone. But what should the rules be??

Can I just argue instead that Roosevelt’s theory has already won out? There’s really no going back to Taft’s conception of a subservient executive branch at this point. Power, once ceded, is very difficult to take back. And I do, as a general rule, lean more toward Roosevelt’s conception than Taft’s. You can’t rely on Congress as the dominant entity if you actually want to be able to get things done. A working government needs one leader to be able to turn to, one person to be responsible for making quick decisions.

I think that one thing both sides can agree on is that whether you think the President should have more power or less, his official Constitutional authority is annoyingly ill defined. Maybe that sort of flexibility was necessary when the founders first wrote it, but it’s time we put some clearer parameters on the office of the President.

Part of the problem seems to be that we need to leave Presidents room to deal with unforeseen situations, and strictly defining the limits of the Presidency might get in the way of that.  Do I think FDR should have been able to put Japanese people into internment camps? Or that Lincoln should have been able to suspend habeas corpus? Absolutely not! (Obviously!) But what specific limit on executive authority would have prevented this?  How do we limit these kinds of injustices without neutering the presidency so much that it’s no longer effective?

I feel like this has been a really unsatisfactory blog entry, so I hope that you guys had clearer ideas of what you thought than I did. Maybe I can redeem myself in the comments part of this.