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Babies’ brains
are still getting
wired months
after birth, a
study shows
Finding the lost
highway: juicy
anecdotes, sharp
analysis in a life
of Hank Williams
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Saturday/Sunday, December 17 - 18, 2016 | C1
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY STEPHEN WEBSTER
Donald Trump will
inherit an executive
branch whose powers
have ballooned
far beyond their
constitutional bounds.
I
BY JEFFREY ROSEN
N AN INTERVIEW in early
December, Speaker of the House Paul
Ryan said that President-elect Donald
Trump is committed to respecting
the constitutional prerogatives of
Congress. “We’ve talked about…the
separation of powers,” he told “60
Minutes.” “He feels very strongly,
actually, that under President Obama’s
watch, he stripped a lot of power away from
the Constitution, away from the legislative
branch of government, and we want to reset
the balance of power so that [the] people
and the Constitution are rightfully restored.”
H If history is any guide, Mr. Ryan’s optimism is misplaced. H During the election of
1912, the Progressive candidate, Theodore
Roosevelt, articulated a populist defense of
virtually unchecked executive power, declaring that the president is a “steward of the
people” who can do anything that the Constitution does not explicitly forbid. Roosevelt’s rival, the Republican incumbent William Howard Taft, defended a far more
constrained view of executive power, holding that the president could only do what
the Constitution explicitly authorized.
Ever since the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Republican and Democratic presidents
have embraced Theodore Roosevelt’s view, asserting ever more expansive visions of the president’s ability to do whatever he likes without
congressional approval. Both George W. Bush and
Barack Obama aggressively deployed executive
power to circumvent Congress, and their partisans accepted it. During his own
campaign, Mr. Trump declared, “I
am your voice” and “I alone can
fix it.” This is not the rhetoric of a
president who intends to defer to
the legislative branch.
Teddy Roosevelt’s populist vision is hard to reconcile with the
vision of the framers of the Constitution, who set out to create a
president energetic enough to
lead national initiatives but constrained enough that he would not
threaten liberty. Alexander Hamilton yearned for
a monarchical president, but the Constitutional
Convention of 1787 designed a presidency with
strikingly few enumerated powers—stronger
than a state governor but much weaker than the
hated tyrant King George III.
Article II of the Constitution assigns to the
president a few explicit powers—command of the
armed forces, a veto on legislation, the power to
make appointments and treaties with the Senate’s
consent—but the text doesn’t specify whether the
president has any general powers beyond those
specifically listed. It fell to George Washington to
fill in some of the gaps—establishing, for example,
the president’s power to recognize foreign governments and initiate treaty negotiations without formally consulting the Senate.
From George Washington to Abraham Lincoln,
presidents were sensitive, by and large, to Congress’s constitutional prerogatives, which Congress asserted vigorously. President Washington, for instance, was
concerned enough about “the insidious wiles of foreign influence”
in American politics that he issued
a proclamation threatening criminal prosecution of any U.S. citizen
who took sides in the war pitting
revolutionary France against the
rest of Europe. But he also thought
it important, after the fact, to persuade Congress to endorse this
policy of neutrality.
When President James K. Polk moved troops
to the Mexican-American border in 1846 in response to what he claimed was the emergency of
a Mexican invasion, a Whig congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln introduced his faPlease turn to the next page
The framers
wanted a
president
who would not
be a threat
to liberty.
Mr. Rosen is the president and CEO of the
National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
His new book is “Louis D. Brandeis: American
Prophet,” and he is working on a biography of
William Howard Taft.
INSIDE
EXHIBIT
In the
1800s,
Germany
was the
go-to place
for toys.
Here are
some
vivid
reasons
why.
C12
MOVING TARGETS
Joe Queenan
asks: What if
corporations
overshared,
big time,
in their
holiday
cards?
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ESSAY
Why do Jews use a different
menorah for Hanukkah?
A two-millennia-old answer.
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GETTY IMAGES(BOOKS)
BOOKS
From Italian treats to colonial
faves, a full bar of titles about
spirits and cocktails.
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ESSAY
Moved by an ancestor’s murder
under Stalin, a young Russian
fights to recall the bloody past.
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