For the last 50 years Americans have been decrying the increase of presidential power whenever the party they oppose is in office. Republicans hated to see Kennedy and Clinton throwing their weight around, while Democrats deplored the ‘imperial presidency’ of Nixon and Reagan. F.H. Buckley, a Canadian law professor now working in Virginia, explains why presidents have become so powerful. He adds that it’s not just an American problem. Prime ministers in Britain and Canada have also grown more powerful at the expense of their countries’ parliaments, but to a lesser, and less menacing, degree.
He argues that American conditions today are very different from those foreseen by the founding fathers when they wrote the constitution in 1787. They were suspicious of popular democracy, and thought they were creating a system in which Congress would be dominant, with the President acting merely to carry out its wishes. Before long, however, the spread of popular democracy made the President the one figure who embodied the nation as a whole.
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