Thursday, July 23, 2009
How things change
I'm a little more than halfway through this excellent bio of George Washington. Many times the author emphasizes how much Washington went out of his way to avoid providing any direction on policy or legislation to the Congress; the president should not provide any guidance. In his opinion the sole job of the president with respect to policy was to approve or veto bills from Congress. Furthermore, his belief was that the president should only veto a bill if it somehow was going to violate the Constitution.
A far cry from our political situation today.
A far cry from our political situation today.
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8 comments:
I have a feeling if you brought the founding fathers and the revolutionary army (if you can call it that) in a time machine to today they'd start a new revolution.
I totally agree.
In fairness, that extremely limited view of the executive was short lived. Andrew Jackson surely didn't see things that way, nor did Lincoln or TR, from Presidents I like a little better.
That said, Coolidge would have loved to be president in 1800 and not the 1920s. He would've embraced that position, and did as best he could.
Andrew Jackson was the first president to really expand the powers of the executive office. Before him, all US presidents took an extremely limited view of executive power. This was obviously in large part to avoid the appearance of a monarchy-like situation, but also because they were really trying to still feel out the best mode of separation of powers.
While there are certainly advantages in efficiency in having a single leader provide a clear direction, and you definitely couldn't have a president today survive following Washington's interpretation of the role of the president, I can't help but think they had a cleaner implementation of checks and balances back then.
You don't think Congress is doing an effective job checking executive power right now?
I think you need to read your own posts. They're doing a nice job keeping the CIA in line.
And luckily now the executive branch will keep our cops in line. So we've got that going for us.
Yeah, dog. They always be harrassin me and sh*t.