It is frequently stated by the media and general public that the US president is the most powerful person in the world. Jokes abound about the competency of individual US presidents and how it’s obscene to entrust the big red nuclear button to such individuals. Countless films exist where disaster strikes, perhaps in the form of a catastrophic storm or even an alien invasion, and one of the first responses is, “We’d better call the president”. Popular culture has imbued the office of the US president with a breathtakingly powerful aura which captivates the imagination. But how accurate is this portrayal, or rather assumption, of the office of the US presidency? I will be writing a series of articles over the coming weeks which examine this question. This first article will briefly introduce the basic legal and historical contexts surrounding the US presidency and explain that the office of president was never intended to be all-powerful.
Let us consider where the powers of the US president originate and what those powers officially are. The key legal document which gives the US president power is the US Constitution. This was written in 1787 by the Founding Fathers, the individuals who led the military and political resistance against the British during the American War of Independence, and it came into effect in 1789. The US Constitution in its original form consisted of seven articles, though by 1791 it also included ten amendments (known as the Bill of Rights) and its current form includes twenty-seven amendments. The seven articles outline the different branches of the US Government and set out what powers each branch should have. There are three branches of government outlined by the US Constitution: The legislative (Congress, which includes the House of Representatives and the Senate), the executive (the presidency) and the judiciary (the Supreme Court and other law courts). Other than the vice-president, who is part of the executive and has a seat in the Senate, no individual can hold an office in more than one branch of the US Government. This is known as the separation of powers and prevents any single person from dominating government, thereby preventing a president from combining several offices and establishing any kind of dictatorship.
As the US Constitution identifies and separates the branches of government, it also assigns certain powers to each branch of government. Those powers may be used to counter the powers exercised by another branch of the government. This is known as the system of checks and balances and, along with the separation of powers, is intended to prevent any one branch of government, or individual in government, from becoming too powerful. In order to understand how this works, it is necessary to outline exactly where the president’s powers are within the Constitution and the culture which influenced the writing of the Constitution before exploring what those exact powers are. Rather tellingly, the president’s powers are not outlined until Article II of the constitution, with Congressional power being set out immediately in Article I. Clearly, the Founding Fathers aimed to emphasise congressional power over presidential power, thus creating a presidency which was always intended to be relatively weak.
To understand why the Founding Fathers chose to make the office of the president weak, it is essential to appreciate the political climate and culture in which the US Constitution was written. The Founding Fathers were heavily influenced by their experiences of fighting the British during the War of Independence (1775-1783). Estimates vary but some figures suggest up to as many as 70,000 Americans may have been killed during the war, either through combat or as a result of disease spreading during military campaigns. When the British commander, Lord Cornwallis, surrendered at Yorktown, Virginia, to General George Washington in 1781, the Americans had finally secured freedom to determine their own laws and future. Parliament passed legislation in 1782 which forbade further British military offensives in North America and the 1783 Treaty of Paris officially ended the war, with the last British forces withdrawing from New York in late November 1783.
One cannot overstate the significance of this moment to Americans; the whole point of the war had been to gain freedom from what was seen then as Britain’s oppressive system of government under King George III. Whether the American revolutionaries’ portrayal of George III as a tyrant was actually fair and accurate is another matter altogether and beyond the scope of this article, but it is clear that the Founding Fathers were anxious about concentrating too much power in either one individual or one branch of government. After all, having fought for and won independence from Britain, the Founding Fathers were keen to avoid creating a governmental system which resembled the centralised British monarchy. They therefore aimed to be careful in outlining the powers which would be invested in the office of the presidency.
