Mr. President (43 page)

The framers believed, and we do too, that the chief executive should facilitate efficient governance. We might not choose the term they used, “vigor,” but we expect the same results. Efficiency, though, should not be used to justify an overreach of executive authority. Although rule by committee had proved cumbersome during Revolutionary days, monarchical rule was even worse. Limits must be placed on executive prerogatives. Patronage should not go unchecked. On the other hand, the chief executive should be able to check legislative overreach. Balanced government was and is the ideal.

The president is the head of state, representing American interests with foreign nations. Simultaneously, he (now he/she) is to set a high
moral tone within the nation. Only because a president does not seek power for its own sake can he be entrusted to command the armed forces.

The presidency must be anchored by a credible electoral process that has the people’s trust. Unless losers as well as winners accept the results, the office will not function properly.

These goals, general as they are, provide some commonality across time. To deny any, then or now, would be to venture beyond the limits of acceptable discourse.

In several ways, though, our values have changed over time, and expectations of the presidency have evolved accordingly. Most notably, of course, we no longer allow our government to sanction slavery, as framers of the Constitution did. While this dramatic turn does not directly affect views of the presidency per se, it both highlights the differences over time and hints at other changes that do. Doubtless, nobody at the Federal Convention imagined that any American citizen, including women, blacks, and those without property, could enjoy the franchise, that white males would someday constitute only a minority of those casting votes for the president, and that a person of color or a woman might actually run for or even occupy the highest office in the land. This revolution in the composition of the civic body, as sweeping as it is, signifies even more than an expansion of the president’s constituency. The role of the electorate, both in choosing and in influencing the president, has changed. Today the people, not presidential electors, effectively choose the president. (Although residual peculiarities of the elector system still allow for the election of a president who does not win the popular vote, the electors themselves have nothing to do with this. It would be unconscionable for a member of the Electoral College to vote according to his own discretion, as the framers assumed he would do.) Further, once in office the president is expected to follow the “mandate” granted him by the voters, or at least not to cross them; the people place limits on discretionary governance. In short, the framers did not perceive the historical thrust toward democracy, a plausible and even logical evolution of their own notion of popular sovereignty.
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In a related vein, eighteenth-century Americans held to a different ethic of campaigning. Self-promotion and pandering to voters—the framers deemed these dishonorable, and even more dishonored would be a president who bowed to the desires of those who financed his
campaign. Indeed, the very act of bankrolling a campaign would have been viewed as evidence of corruption; the president ought never to be bought, either before or after his election. Today, we accept the melding of money and politics with a grain of salt, but accept it we do, and that probably marks the largest difference between our view of the presidency and that of the founding generation.

The framers also believed that the ideal president should be nonpartisan in every sense of the word, representing no party, region, or interest group. At the Federal Convention, the goal was to create an office that would lessen differences, not accentuate them. During ratification debates, the prospect of a nonpartisan presidency under Washington provided at least a weak palliative to calm Anti-Federalists. We have not totally forsaken this ideal, but it is increasingly difficult to locate. To gain a party’s nomination, a presidential candidate must convince fellow Democrats or Republicans that he/she will vanquish the opposition, and then in the general election the candidates, or at least their surrogates, routinely vilify each other. Eventually, the winner will issue the presumptive “I will be a president for all Americans” pronouncement, but even then a president who takes bipartisanship seriously and acts on that principle is accused of being too weak and told to start “acting like a Democrat” or “acting like a Republican.” We put forth mixed messages, causing a president to fall short no matter which path he or she follows.
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Such are the basic parameters of the presidency, then and now. Keeping both the framers’ values and our own in mind, where they merge and where they diverge, we can compare what they believed they created with the presidency of today. Has the office achieved what they expected of it?

In several ways that we often take for granted, it has. The president’s role as commander in chief, a provision that frightened Anti-Federalists in 1787–88, has indeed helped to ensure civilian control of the military. Elsewhere in the world, political turmoil often leads to military takeovers, but we don’t worry about that in the United States. Civilian control has produced immeasurable dividends, and the very fact that we forget to acknowledge it constitutes a tribute to its success.

The presidential veto, also of concern to Anti-Federalists, has not produced, by itself, executive abuses of power. It is invoked rarely, albeit threatened more often, yet it has still served to check the power of
Congress, as the framers intended. The veto and the override, in conjunction, have furthered the interests of balanced governance, precisely the framers’ intention.

Similarly, the provision for impeachment of the president has not destroyed the balance of powers, as some contemporaries had feared. Twice, in the cases of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, the ruling majority in the House of Representatives has issued articles of impeachment, but in both instances the Senate determined that the charges fell short of the tough standards for conviction the framers had set: “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Only once, when Richard Nixon clearly broke the law, did the likely prospect of impeachment and conviction cause a resignation. The notion behind impeachment was that even the president must somehow be held accountable but that the means of dismissing him should not be amenable to political manipulation. Although some still might argue that Johnson had in fact committed an impeachable offense, he was acquitted in large measure because of the fear of setting a precedent for political manipulation of the impeachment process, which the framers had hoped to prevent. Impeachment, in short, has toed the fine line they hoped it would.

With one glaring exception, the election of Abraham Lincoln, the transition from one president to the next has been peaceful. Losers have accepted the results, even when they had reason to do otherwise. This too was not guaranteed at the outset. Anti-Federalists feared that a president who failed to be reelected would find some means of remaining in power, but George Washington, the nation’s first president,
voluntarily
became its first ex-president, and then John Adams, after coming up short in the contested election of 1800, quietly boarded a stage to return home on the eve of his successor’s inauguration. All subsequent presidents who were defeated at the polls have lived with the results, as the framers hoped and we now assume.

Again with only one exception, presidents have not sought to repeat in office more than once. The framers did not stipulate a limit on the number of presidential terms, but many Anti-Federalists wanted such a constraint, and finally, more than a century and a half later, their concern was answered in the form of the Twenty-Second Amendment. Before that, seven presidents followed Washington’s precedent and retired after two terms; only Franklin Delano Roosevelt, facing a
war of historic proportions, sought a third term. Delegates to the Federal Convention wanted to create a strong executive leader who had no expectation of lifetime tenure, and in this they had their way.

Understanding they could not define the office of the presidency beyond the broadest outline, the framers expected details to be worked out later, as in fact they were. If the president and the Senate combined to make appointments, did that mean they had to concur in removing the officials they had appointed? In treaty making, what, exactly, would the “Advice and Consent” of the Senate entail? Answers would have to be honed by subsequent statesmen. Whether or not those later formulations reflected the framers’ true intentions, answers were provided, fleshing out the office more fully than anyone could possibly have done in advance. This organic evolution did not violate the framers’ wishes but embodied them. The last thing they wanted was for their new government to be completely codified, unable to adjust to the needs of the people it was intended to serve.

Yet political, societal, and even technological changes in later years have not only fine-tuned the office the framers conjured but altered it in significant ways. The framers, of course, cannot be held responsible for alterations due to causes they did not and in many cases could not foresee, but to understand the differences between the presidency as it was originally intended and the office it was to become, we need to take stock of these various transformations.

Consider the immediate distortion of the framers’ most unique contribution to governmental forms—the system of presidential electors—and the political realities that prevent it from being altered or abolished. The partisan divide in the 1790s made clear from the outset that the system could be gamed, thus negating individual discretion and undermining the entire scheme. This much the framers might have foreseen had they asked tougher questions, and indeed, judging from the lukewarm support of many Federalists—“it’s not perfect, but it’s the best available option”—they would not have been surprised to see their complicated formula modified, as it was in 1804 with passage of the Twelfth Amendment, which allowed electors to vote separately for president and vice president. Yet they could not have been expected to predict that the nation would be saddled indefinitely with the rest of their elector scheme because of the political difficulties in gaining the approval of three-quarters of the states, the threshold for amending
the Constitution. Three types of states have vested interests in preserving what we now call the Electoral College—small states, battleground states, and early primary states—and while the framers did notice that the system gave small states a slight advantage, they failed to anticipate the significance of battleground states, and they had no conception of what early primary states might be, much less how these would help preserve their dubious creation.

The framers understood the dangers that state and regional rivalries posed in electing a president, and they tried to mitigate these by requiring each presidential elector to cast at least one of his votes for a person from outside his own state. This was not nearly enough to prevent regional interests from driving presidential elections, and worse yet, another provision highlighted regional rivalries: the notorious three-fifths clause, which increased representation from the South not only in the House of Representatives but also in the Electoral College. With this added benefit, slave states in the early Republic were able to capture the presidency by picking up only a handful of electoral votes north of the Mason-Dixon Line. The impact on the nation’s political complexion, and specifically on the presidency, can be gleaned from some basic statistics. Without the extra electors resulting from the three-fifths clause, Jefferson would have dropped at least twelve electoral votes in 1800, resulting in his defeat; in effect, he was elected by slaves who could not vote, an ironic outcome not lost on Federalists who labeled him “the Negro president.” Before 1850, slaveholders held the presidency for all but twelve years. The five presidents who repeated in office—Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Jackson—were all slaveholding southerners, and this was no accident. Presidential candidates at that time were determined by congressional caucuses within each party, and the three-fifths clause increased the relative strength of southerners within the Republican caucus. No Republican could receive his party’s support without the full concurrence of its pro-slavery majority, which helped determine both the party’s and the president’s agenda.
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Once in office, these slaveholding presidents strengthened their regional grip on the federal government by filling half the high offices with southerners, even though the South accounted for just over one-third of the free population. Of the thirty-one presidential appointees to the Supreme Court prior to 1850, eighteen owned slaves. Presidential
actions were influenced by inflated numbers of southerners in the House of Representatives, who killed measures that banned slavery from the territories. When Jefferson purchased Louisiana, Monroe annexed Florida, and Polk went to war with Mexico, each was aiding slavery’s expansion and through the three-fifths clause further increasing the number of southern votes in presidential elections. Even Washington, who more than any other tried
not
to be a regional president, supported southern interests on at least one hotly contested issue. In 1793 the Federalist Congress, to conform with the 1790 census, passed a reapportionment bill that gave the North a net gain of four seats in the House. When considering whether or not to sign the measure into law, Washington consulted his closest advisers. Hamilton and Knox supported the bill, but Jefferson, Madison, and Randolph opposed it and argued for an alternate construction of the numbers more generous to the South. Despite his reluctance to cross Congress, Washington sided with his fellow Virginians and delivered the nation’s first presidential veto.
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The three-fifths clause only heightened the regionalism that created it. Delegates to the Federal Convention were already divided along regional lines, and few would have been surprised to see that rift widened by their own doing. They understood the compromise for what it was, a measure grounded in political realities rather than in solid republican theory.