That the president uniquely represents the national interest is a
political truism, yet this idea has been transformational, shaping the
efforts of Congress to remake the presidency and testing the
adaptability of American constitutional government. The emergence of
the modern presidency in the first half of the twentieth century
transformed the American government. But surprisingly, presidents were
not the primary driving force of this change—Congress was. Through a
series of statutes, lawmakers endorsed presidential leadership in the
legislative process and augmented the chief executive’s
organizational capacities. But why did Congress grant presidents
this power? In Power Shifts, John A. Dearborn shows that legislators
acted on the idea that the president was the best representative of
the national interest. Congress subordinated its own claims to
stand as the nation’s primary representative institution and
designed reforms that assumed the president was the superior steward
of all the people. In the process, Congress recast the nation’s
chief executive as its chief representative. As Dearborn
demonstrates, the full extent to which Congress’s reforms rested on
the idea of presidential representation was revealed when that
notion’s validity was thrown into doubt. In the 1970s, Congress
sought to restore its place in a rebalanced system, but legislators
also found that their earlier success at institutional reinvention
constrained their efforts to reclaim authority. Chronicling the
evolving relationship between the presidency and Congress across a
range of policy areas, Power Shifts exposes a fundamental dilemma in
an otherwise proud tradition of constitutional adaptation.
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Congress and Presidential Representation
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780226797977
Publisert
2021
Utgiver
Vendor
University of Chicago Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter