When a Roman general had won a great victory, the Senate would award him a triumph. He would parade through Rome with emblems of his victory. Captured trophies, vanquished foes, and throngs of adoring, cheering Romans combined to give a feeling of transcendence to the conqueror. However, the Senate harbored a deep distrust of military heroes as well. In order that the feted general not get ideas above his station, a slave stood beside him in his triumphal chariot. The slave held the laurels just above the general’s head and said softly again and again, “Remember: you are only a man”. This story was well-known to the Framers of the US Constitution. They admired the Roman Republic for its distrust of individualized power, and having come from the rule of a despotic English king (in their view), they were determined to incorporate the virtues of the Roman Republic into the unified government of the United States.
How is it then that these people, so distrustful of concentrated power, should have engendered a system that confers such immense power upon a single individual, the President of the United States? This is a conundrum upon which I often reflect. I suspect that the intent of the Framers can be discerned in the terms with which they described the Presidency and the Oath of Office. The Presidency is called the Executive Branch. The President swears to carry out the laws of the United States, to see that they are well and faithfully executed. I am no lawyer but a fair reading of that suggests that they envisaged the President not as the equal of Congress but as its servant. The President would reside in the National Capital during his term of office, make sure that the Government functioned effectively and that the country was defended. The purpose of that was to allow the members of Congress to go back to their own lives as professional men, running businesses, plantations, etc. Almost immediately, however, the President, left alone to run things, began to get the idea that he in fact was the government and the Congress was just there to help. Without someone appointed by Congress to remind the President daily that he was merely the servant of Congress and not its master, the rot set in.
In the same way that enormous wealth through the exigencies of war, corrupted and finally destroyed the Roman Republic, so too the enormous wealth and power of post-war America has vastly expanded the Presidency into an Institution of almost unlimited reach. We have gone from a time when the President had to ask the Congress for funds to raise an army to a situation where the President is the head of a huge standing army, a vast network of spies, the power to frustrate the will of Congress by his veto power, and the ability to alter the nature of the Supreme Court. In fact, the President today has powers not too different from those of the Emperor Augustus. Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome, maintained many of the outward trappings of the Republic but the Senate became nothing more than an advisory body, if that.
As we go into the 2008 Presidential election season, I am torn between my natural desire to see an effective President elected and my strengthening belief that the Presidency itself is a toxic Institution that has helped to militarize American society, that has undermined American democracy, and that now represents a very real threat to Constitutional government in the USA. The fact that we elect a new “Emperor” every 4 years does not alter the fact that the Presidency itself is inherently corrupt and needs serious reform to re-establish it as an arm of Congress rather than a branch in its own right.
As a last thought, I wonder how many of the current contenders would still be running for President if its powers were more in line with what the Framers had in mind. Not too many, I would guess.