When President William McKinley walk into the Palace of Music at the Pan - American Exposition in Buffalo , New York , on Sept. 6 , 1901 , he was an enormously popular figure with an effected record as master executive . That ’s why , despite the intense oestrus , so many the great unwashed had line up to run across him at the scheduled reception . But when he elongate out his deal to a 28 - year - old former steelworker named Leon Czolgosz , the unseasoned valet de chambre pulled a .32 - caliber handgun from his pocket and enkindle two bullets at peak blank range .
President McKinley die of his wounds eight Clarence Day later on , and Czolgosz was action the next month . The assassin was an avowed nihilist , and his reason for kill McKinley had nothing to do with the president in person ; rather , he was incite by an ideologic belief that powerful rulers should be eliminated . There is no little irony in this because Czolgosz ’s action handed thepresidencyto a man who would do more to expand executive power than any president before him [ origin : Andrews ] .
Theodore Roosevelt had made his name as the commander of the Rough Riders cavalry whole in the Battle of San Juan Hill in Cuba during the Spanish - American War . After the war he successfully campaign for the governorship of New York where he established a platter as a pop and in force reformer . But this was the era of " political political boss , " when sinewy , unelected men smoking cigars in back elbow room could make or break a political career . The political boss of the Republican Party in New York at the sentence , a man advert Tom Platt , did n’t need a meliorist and decided to prevent a second Roosevelt term by shuffling the brash young politician into the innocuous character of vice president . As with the activeness of the anarchist assassin , this strategy would backfire .
Theodore Roosevelt would be a ruler and reformist unlike any the country had ever see . At 42 , he was , and still is , the youngest person to have ever book the part of U.S. president . His view of his new situation was simple , but unprecedented . Whereas previous president had , for the most part , followed the worldwide rule that their role was to carry out the jurisprudence created by Congress , Theodore Roosevelt experience that as Commander in Chief he was complimentary to do as he please wherever , and whenever , he please unless the jurisprudence specifically said he could n’t [ informant : Theodore Roosevelt Association ] . It was a political philosophy that would change the U.S. presidency forever , show in a new earned run average of executive power .
What Does a President Do All Day?
Every American schooltime child learns that the U.S. federal government is composed of three branches : the administrator , the legislative and the judiciary . The legislative arm , made up of the House of Representatives and the Senate , creates the law of the state ; the executive director puts those constabulary into practice and enforces them ; and the bench takes a cold , heavy look at the law to make indisputable they ’re constituent .
But , of course , thing are flake more complicated than that . The executive branch , head by the Chief Executive , does indeed execute the laws created by the legislature , via the Union departments , board , commissions and agencies it controls . The Chief Executive is directly responsible for appointing the heads of the 15 different executive department ( including the Department of Defense , the Department of Transportation and the Department of Labor ) , in addition to hundreds of office ( such as the Central Intelligence Agency , Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Emergency Management Agency ) , boards ( like the Federal Reserve Board ) and mission ( e.g. , the Securities and Exchange Commission ) — not to mention nominate federal judges , Supreme Court justicesand ambassadors .
As the individual in charge of all of these administration , the president can issue executive orders to them , and those orders automatically become law . While this is seen as a way for the president to effectively bypass the general assembly , it ’s a method that has an authoritative downside — namely that a successor can use that same executive power to change by reversal the decree of his or her predecessor .
So , for instance , when Barack Obama strike berth , his first executive order rescinded George W. Bush ’s executive edict to make access to presidential archive more hard .
As head of government , the president sign Congress ’s novel statute law into police or vetoes it . Congress can override the veto but only with a two - thirds vote of both sign of the zodiac . The president is also , famously , the Commander in Chief of the country ’s huge armed force and , as such , can take the country to war , although technically only with the permission of Congress ( we ’ll come back to that triviality shortly ) .
The President of the United States is also the head of state , intend that he or she is top dog of foreign relations and can negotiate trade deals and treaties , although here Congress really does have the last word and must sign such agreement with the magic two - thirds vote .
And finally , the chairwoman can pardon anybody he or she wishes , as long as that soul has been convicted of a Union offense [ source : Whitehouse.gov ] .
Executive Powers Through the Ages, Part I
Theodore Roosevelt later said of his presidency that while he did n’t grab power , he did stretch executive authority beyond its previous scope [ beginning : Bill of Rights Institute ] . On the home front , for instance , he intervene personally to make up Labour conflict , pressed firmly to order ( and break ) corporate monopoly and exercised his authority to keep up vast piece of ground of wild in the American West .
He was also extremely active on the foreign stage , becoming the first American to receive aNobel Peace Prizefor his negotiations to end the Russo - Nipponese War of 1904 - 1905 . And his initiative to buy a segment ofPanamaand dig a cock-a-hoop ditch through it laid the groundwork for America ’s outgrowth as a world power in the 20th C . It was n’t that the Constitution explicitly forbade president from doing such things , it ’s just that it did n’t explicitly say they could . As far asTeddy Rooseveltwas concerned , absence of proscription was an invitation to action . He had a figure of matter he want to accomplish and feel that the executive offset was the venue in which to accomplish them .
Since Roosevelt , successive presidents have seek to expand the reach of their mogul . Take that " technicality " mentioned before — the prerequisite that a President of the United States take in commendation from Congress before take away the country to state of war . This communications protocol was respected through both world war , but the Cold War produce particular experimental condition . In the 1950s , fear of the Soviet threat was such that President of the United States could border Congress in the interestingness of national defense . So , for example , Harry Truman was able-bodied to able to engage U.S. troops in the Korean conflict without Congressional approval by avoiding war terminology . It was a police force action , he allege , undertaken jointly with the UN — nothing Congress needed to worry about . It was a case in point that others , including Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton , would follow .
By the time Dwight Eisenhower take office , the President of the United States had a shady new tool to habituate — theCentral Intelligence Agency . With clandestine operations fully in play , constitutional niceties were on the side off the table . When John F. Kennedy lead office in 1960 it was generally understood that the president , and not the Senate Foreign Relations Committee , was now the big boss of U.S. international affair .
But peachy top executive confers a special vulnerability . Harry Truman famously said , " The buck stops here " — and that ’s just it . If a Chief Executive who wants to wield enormous authority hold up out on a limb , that limb bends with the weight of pop opinion . When the Korean War went south , Truman was held responsible ( since he was ) , and his commendation numbers went south with it .
understand the motivation for pop support , Eisenhower extract the U.S. from Korea and used statecraft , brinkmanship and covert mathematical process to successfully contain the Soviet scourge . Thanks to these methods , which command less rake and hoarded wealth than straight-out war , he was able to keep his popularity , which in turn batten his hold on executive mogul in the empyrean of foreign relations [ rootage : Dallek ] .
Executive Powers Through the Ages, Part II
Kennedy took a page from Eisenhower ’s book and then added chapter of his own . Having learned the all important object lesson that democratic keep was primal to presidential tycoon , Kennedy tap the significant young medium of television receiver to convey directly and eloquently with the American citizenry . deploy his considerable charm and brain , Kennedy was able to wield his popularity even in the cheek of an early reversal like the 1961Bay of Pigsfiasco . When the U.S.-backed " invasion " of Cuba was annihilated by Fidel Castro ’s troops , Kennedy went before the cameras to honestly assume full obligation for the catastrophe . The world forgave him , and his popularity ratings actually rose . His heir , Lyndon Johnson , failed to learn the lesson and act without Congressional or democratic support in Vietnam , ending up politically ruined .
Since then , presidential power has waxed and decline with a given leader ’s power to assemble and keep up public support . This ability has rested on the president ’s communication skills . Presidents possess of the rhetorical natural endowment necessary to tie with the world have come comfortably than those more prone to operate on the down - low .
The 1970sWatergatescandal was a major black eye to executive director authorization because it revealed just how much Richard Nixon was hiding from the electorate . surreptitious operation go away wrong during the Carter and Reagan presidency further eroded executive authority to such an extent that when George H.W. Bush decide to go to state of war with Saddam Hussein in 1991 , he asked Congress for a resolution first .
In subsequent years , presidents have done a scrap of both , puzzle congressional financial backing where necessary and conducting one-sided operations where expedient and unlikely to damage popularity ratings . Barack Obama ’s utilization of lagger strikes is a clear example of a president conducting military actions afield without risking the stock and gem that drop down George W. Bush ’s number so low in the wake of the Iraq and Afghanistan encroachment . While George W. had supportive resolutions from Congress for these action , he did n’t have proper declarations of war , which might have helped get to the blame for those unpopular battle more equally and saved him from the ruinous drop in his popularity .
When a chairperson ’s popularity wane , he often feels the pain in the neck in the manikin of a midterm examination election that bring him with a hostile Congress , which can nix his veto and/or simply refuse to work with him . In such instance , a Chief Executive normally change state to the consolation of executive order . And when a president startle severely wielding his executive orders for bypass Congress , he ’s almost always accused of being an " imperial president . " This is a rush Republican member of Congress have repeatedly levelled at Barack Obama .
A coup d’oeil at the archive shows that while Obama has made liberal use ofexecutive ordersto further his political agenda , he ’s got nothing on his predecessors . He has issued fewer than 300 orders , while precursor like Ronald Reagan ( 381 ) , Dwight Eisenhower ( 484 ) , Harry Truman ( 907 ) and Woodrow Wilson ( 1,803 ) far outstrip him . Topping the tilt is Mr. Executive Order himself , Franklin Delano Roosevelt , with a jaw - dropping 3,721 [ source : American Presidency Project ] .
How Powerful Are Presidents?
" Leader of the free earth , " " The most powerful individual on the planet " — how often have we heard these phrase in reference to the U.S. president ? But is the United States President really all that ? Yes and no . While the president does maintain enormous power through his ( so far just his ) executive authority , there are protocols and procedures , chains of command and a vast bureaucratic machinery in place , all of which make it hard for him to dictate precipitous changes in policy . There ’s also that business of " checks and equilibrium " set up by the Founders , design specifically to forestall despotic rule by a individual tyrant . The other branches of government can put the brakes on a misdemean prexy ( as Richard Nixon discover to his sorrow when impeached by Congress in 1974 ) .
In fact , a ready comparing of the American president with the leaders of other democracies reveals that the U.S. leader is considerably less free to do than his counterparts . In a country like Canada , for instance , which succeed the Westminster parliamentary system created in the UK , the prime diplomatic minister can never be a " lame duck’s egg . " That ’s because there are no arrest and counterweight , and the entire system of rules is quite different . For a start , the prime minister is not popularly elect at the federal level . Rather , each political party elect its own leader from among its rector of Parliament ( roughly equivalent to representatives in the U.S. ) . When a yield party gains enough seats in the House of Commons ( something like the House of Representatives ) it can take index , and its leader becomes the prime minister [ source : Parliament of Canada ] .
Often there are multiple parties in parliament , and some of them might band together to take in enough seats to have the absolute majority necessary to rule . In any sheath , the premier diplomatic minister can never be in a position where he or she is prevented from conduct out insurance policy . If , say , a political party that ’s part of a politics coalition really does n’t like the direction things are going , they can vote against it . Such a vote intend that the current politics can no longer govern , and it more or less automatically triggers a new election [ informant : Parliament of Canada ] . As a result , gridlock , as it occur in Washington , is next to unimaginable in the Westminster system of rules .
While such a organization can have its downside ( squabbling coalitions , sometimes frequent election ) studies have shown that it ’s actually much more unchanging than presidential systems of regime . In fact , with the notable exception of the U.S. , most presidential systems have tended to lapse all too quickly intodictatorship . On median , parliamentary democracy last at least doubly as long as the average presidential systems , and only three presidential systems make it onto the list of the 20 longest - survive republic . Because clash between the different arm of a presidential organisation can make governmental palsy , this can foment a political climate that valorizes the convention of a solid , case-by-case leader , which in turn establishes the slippy slope to tyranny [ source : Ilan ] .
A long , proud custom of anti - tyrannical democracy has assist the U.S. avoid this destiny for nearly two and a half C ; allow ’s hope that custom maintain stiff for many centuries more .
Lots More Information
I ’ve been trying to think of a metaphor for the American presidency and having a hard metre coming up with something convincing . Baseball director ? Hotel chef ? The sailing master of a really big ship ? More like the captain of a heavy populated iceberg in a powerful ocean current . He ca n’t really do much to alter the general impulsion , but he can endure around encouraging people to build up more protection or , or else , chip off at the edges . … No , on the 2d thought , there are no serviceable analog that I can opine of . It ’s just too uncanny and unique a position to summate up .
