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. He was both head of state and head of government, surrounded by an aura of sovereignty that no one else could match. Presidents could insulate themselves from Congress and appeal to the electorate over the heads of the other politicians, secure in the knowledge that fixed terms of office safeguarded their power.
Presidential power has swollen in the last century, along with the administrative state. As ever more federal bureaucracies come into existence, Congress delegates to them the authority to make and enforce the rules. The President appoints the administrators of these bureaucracies and fills all the important positions with members of his own party. As a result, they become extensions of his will, because they serve at his pleasure. Much of their work is so specialised, and its volume is so immense, that congressional oversight can do little more than offer broad guidelines.
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