The 2016 Election and the Cult of the Presidency
Against all odds, in January, Donald Trump will become the 45th president of the United States. Throughout the nation, Americans are decrying how someone so transparently likely to abuse power can become president. But, maybe it was a bad idea to concentrate so much power in the Oval Office in the first place...
“The prospect of Donald Trump as president is only slightly less ridiculous than the idea of Charlie Sheen with nukes—and possibly more frightening.”
— Gene Healy, Vice President, Cato Institute
In the waning days of the Bush administration, the Cato Institute published The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power, by Gene Healy, which revealed how the demands we place on the presidency have turned it into a constitutional monstrosity.
It’s no secret that the “most powerful office in the world” grew even more powerful in the Bush-Obama years. Both presidents stretched the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force into a wholesale delegation of congressional war powers broad enough to underwrite open-ended, globe-spanning war. Bush began—and Obama continued—the host of secret dragnet surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden—and others we’re still largely the dark about. And lately, on the home front, Obama has used the power of the pen to rewrite broad swathes of American law and spend billions of dollars Congress never appropriated.
When our scholars lionize presidents who break free from constitutional restraints, when our columnists and talking heads repeatedly call upon the “commander in chief ” to dream great dreams and seek the power to achieve them—when voters look to the president for salvation from all problems great and small—should we really be surprised that the presidency has burst its constitutional bonds and grown powerful enough to threaten American liberty?
The Cult of the Presidency takes a step back from the ongoing red team/blue team combat and shows that, at bottom, conservatives and liberals agree on the boundless nature of presidential responsibility. For both camps, it is the president’s job to grow the economy, teach our children well, provide seamless protection from terrorist threats, and rescue Americans from spiritual malaise.
Conservatives pushed for a stronger presidency during the era of the Emerging Republican Majority, believing they’d hold the office more often than not. They pushed even harder during the second Bush presidency, passing on a presidency with radically enhanced powers to Barack Obama. Liberals, in turn, adopted a “what-me-worry?” attitude toward unchecked war powers, so long as Obama was in charge, and cheered 44’s promise to govern via the pen and the phone.
If the next president can turn out to be a tyrant, then “tyrant-proofing the presidency” is our most pressing political task.
