Obama The Transformer: The Measure Of His Success

Obama famously set out to transform the country, and he may well have largely succeeded — from formerly a nation of laws to whatever we have now become (a nation of Executive Orders?). Simply cataloging the occasions where serious scholars believe he has exceeded his legitimate authority would require a list too long to blog, but anyone interested in the chapter and verse of these examples should consult David Bernstein’s impressive book, Lawless, or Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz’s testimony before Congress, which he discussed here.

Along the same lines, here is one of the most perceptive, and sobering, assessments of what could prove to be the most enduring aspect of Obama’s legacy:

… an unprecedented concentration of power in the White House and an unprecedented attempt to transform the Presidency of the Constitution into a plebiscitary Presidency. If this transformation were carried through, the President, instead of being accountable every day to Congress and public opinion, would be accountable every four years to the electorate. Between elections the President would be accountable only through impeachment and would govern, as much as he could, by decree.

Actually, Obama’s attempt to practice a plebiscitary presidency is not unprecedented. In fact, the above lament was written in 1973 about Richard Nixon by the prototypical, pre-eminent liberal historian and Kennedy courtesan, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., back in the day when liberals cared about such things, in his denunciation of The Imperial Presidency.

Aside from his Watergate transgressions, courts held on numerous occasions that President Nixon had acted beyond the bounds of his authority by refusing to spend funds Congress had appropriated. “It is not within the discretion of the Executive,” Schlesinger quotes one such decision, “to refuse to execute laws passed by Congress but with which the Executive presently disagrees.” (Pennsylvania v. Lynn, 362 F. Supp. 1363 (D.D.C. 1973) Schlesinger also approvingly quotes Sen. Sam Ervin, not on Watergate but on the separation of powers: “I have voted against many of the programs for which the President has impounded funds,” Sen. Ervin declared, “but I do not believe we should allow him to nullify acts of Congress by executive fiat. There is not one syllable in the Constitution which allows the President to exercise such power.”

Where are liberals like Schlesinger now that we need them?

He did get one thing a bit wrong, however. In the conclusion to The Imperial Presidency, Schlesinger wrote that “corruption appears to visit the White House in fifty-year cycles.” From 1968, when Nixon was first elected, however, to 2008, when the Second Coming of Nixon was elected, is only forty years. (If Schlesinger were still alive he would probably reply that, far from being an error, this shorter than predicted cycle is simply a confirmation of something else he was fond of asserting, that “we live in a time when the velocity of history is greater than ever before.”)

 

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  1. CaptDMO January 25, 2016 at 8:36 am | | Reply

    “Simply cataloging the occasions where serious scholars believe he has exceeded his legitimate authority would….”
    Explain to befuddled so-called GOPe, (and most recently “Cuckservitives”)careere professionals, why vast numbers of their previous constituency, and other actual history observers, are simply defenestrating their “Big Ideas” along with their bath water, AKA bilge.

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