Great short piece by Jon Bernstein on the informal boundaries of the Presidency: "In some ways, however, this particular myth is only one of the many ideas of the presidency that were essential in the institution’s development. Many of the things that presidents do, after all, aren’t explicitly in the Constitution, and many of the things we associate with the presidency weren’t done for years and years after the Constitution was adopted. A president just set a precedent, and it stuck. For a minor example, there’s the president’s Saturday radio address, invented by Ronald Reagan and then copied by everyone since, although Barack Obama added a twist with YouTube versions. There’s more: Everything from cabinet meetings to press conferences to “pardoning” Thanksgiving turkeys is part of the slowly built-up White House job requirements." "The truth is that outside of a few big ones—commander in chief, nominations—a whole lot of the formal powers of the presidency comes down to “the executive Power shall be vested in a President” and “he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Beyond that, the job is mostly an empty shell filled up with 44 presidencies worth of precedents. Some of these precedents wind up being enshrined in law, but others are just shared expectations of the job."
Posted on: Fri, 07 Jun 2013 17:34:24 +0000