For Wednesday, read The Constitution, Article II
What is leadership? The Founders usually used the word leader in a negative sense.
Director or Facilitator?
Approaches
Legal
- Article II
- Statutes: Why does Congress cede power?
- The Insurrection Act"
- Emergency legislation
- Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. § 1101 et seq.): empowers POTUS TO suspend the entry of "any class of aliens" deemed detrimental to the interests of the United States.
Institutional
- Bureaucratic politics
- Organizational processes and SOPs
- What is "The Deep State"? (JFK excerpt at 14 min)
Political Power
- Support from the general public and specific constituencies. How do they attain and retain it?
- Money
- Alliances with political elites
Psychological
- Psychobiographies
- Incomplete evidence (esp. for living presidents)
- Reductionism and bad theory
- Bias
- Studies of group dynamics and cognition are more valuable
Also: the trappings and prestige of the office. See Carter at 2:18
Something to keep in mind during any discussion of presidential power: Where you stand depends on where you sit, or whom you support. Take signing statements:
May 19, 2008, in Billings, Montana
Also consider not only what they did but what they refrained from doing.
Why only one president? Why not a troika or a board? Do US states have a form of plural executive power>?
Federalist 70 and plurality in the executive:
But one of the weightiest objections to a plurality in the Executive, and which lies as much against the last as the first plan, is, that it tends to conceal faults and destroy responsibility. Responsibility is of two kinds -- to censure and to punishment. The first is the more important of the two, especially in an elective office. Man, in public trust, will much oftener act in such a manner as to render him unworthy of being any longer trusted, than in such a manner as to make him obnoxious to legal punishment. But the multiplication of the Executive adds to the difficulty of detection in either case. It often becomes impossible, amidst mutual accusations, to determine on whom the blame or the punishment of a pernicious measure, or series of pernicious measures, ought really to fall. It is shifted from one to another with so much dexterity, and under such plausible appearances, that the public opinion is left in suspense about the real author. The circumstances which may have led to any national miscarriage or misfortune are sometimes so complicated that, where there are a number of actors who may have had different degrees and kinds of agency, though we may clearly see upon the whole that there has been mismanagement, yet it may be impracticable to pronounce to whose account the evil which may have been incurred is truly chargeable.
"I was overruled by my council. The council were so divided in their opinions that it was impossible to obtain any better resolution on the point." These and similar pretexts are constantly at hand, whether true or false. And who is there that will either take the trouble or incur the odium, of a strict scrunity into the secret springs of the transaction? Should there be found a citizen zealous enough to undertake the unpromising task, if there happen to be collusion between the parties concerned, how easy it is to clothe the circumstances with so much ambiguity, as to render it uncertain what was the precise conduct of any of those parties?The oath (keep in mind next week when we discuss Lincoln). Roberts screwed up:
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