The American President as a Leader - Report Example

I. Introduction Americans have remarkably made champions and scoundrels of their Presidents, yet people have rarely distrusted the significance and value of the Office of the President as an element for public good and social welfare, and occasionally the world. Such doubts are now felt in several sectors of the American nation, and the American people are in the centre of an episode of uncertainty in which multitudes of people have varied sentiments about Presidents and Presidential power. On the contrary, people desire to find the President as the primary political figure to the development of the American society. Or, people detest several of the decisions and actions of recent Presidents and dread that perhaps there is something intrinsic in the constitution and its extra-constitutional powers that show the way to such exploitations and abuses. The American people no longer have a consistent image of Presidential power and objective that can be raised to give good reason for leadership in the White House. There are disparities in the American people’s pictures of reality and in this particular reality itself. This uncertainty is classified at two aspects. The primary aspect is in the dimension of the representations, value and myths of the past whereas the other one is related to the actual constitutional circumstances and institutional power and influence of Presidents. It is a fact that the Presidency is the paramount representation of the American nation, and Presidents have been among the principal political figures who articulate the American dream. Hence, it is rather difficult for the American people to actually think that a President or succession of Presidents can bring about harm to those principles. People smother the evidence as it seeps into their consciousness. Yet, on the second degree, once people acknowledge that there have been exploitations and misuse of power and objective, the concern emerges whether something can be accomplished to solve them. Even though the American nation has a structure of government that establishes checks and balances on the powers of the Office of the President, such monitoring and regulations are not direct and complicated to get done (Genovese 2001). The American public have witnessed several instances in the previous decades in which Presidents have been able to outmanoeuvre such attempts of control. Furthermore, a dynamic Presidency appears to be the primary factor to policy and program success in such a disjointed political structure, yet the same dynamism carried the American nation into Vietnam and was accountable for the offences of Watergate (ibid). II. The Constitutional Power of the American Presidency The Constitution delineates the duties and powers of the President that he is disallowed to assign or transfer to others. Some of the President’s prominent duties and powers come from his position such as commander-in-chief, chief policy-maker, leader of his political party, head of prosperity, leader of a democratic world, and others. Moreover, the recurrent calamities of the times construct the President as a key player on a global stage and an emergency manager to make use of these constitutional powers (Hargrove 1974). Even though the Presidency has enormous powers, Presidents are by no means constitutionally powerful enough to complete their duties. Congress may and does rebuffs Presidential decisions and programmes; as a matter of fact, the President seldom acquires absolute conformity from Congress. Great surges of restructuring legislation arrive once a generation and normally occur in at least one congressional assemblies of a Presidential term. The remaining time of the President’s term is to negotiate and cooperate with Congress (ibid). However, based on the constitution’s structure and history, the President holds immense powers, particularly in the domains of military and foreign affairs. Such aspects confer favour to the President over and above the Congress and were as a matter of fact perceived as features of executive power than legislative authority at the instance of ratification. A brilliant coterie of founders deemed the president given with absolute power to design and determine the foreign policy of the United States, in considerable extent since they consented with The Federalist that the Constitution must be interpreted to fashion a successful system of foreign policy. As some analysts argued, presidents and congresses throughout the vibrant history of the American nation have considered the President as constitutionally empowered to put into effect far-reaching powers even without authorization from the congress (Cronin 1998). It is the constitutional structure that sets the system of checks and balances. As The Federalist explained, this system wilfully combines the powers of the branches so as to permit them to restrict one another. Though the Constitution does set some exploits entirely permissible in the presidential domain, these are rather extraordinary; for instance, the power of the president to give pardons. Certainly, the Constitution permits the president to give out pardons and Congress could not remove or restrict the President’s exercise of this power. However, Congress can offer the President support in putting into effect this power. If the circumstances for Presidential act that is not given to constitutional boundary are not uncommon, the statutory system would be tossed into imbalance (ibid). II. Extra-Constitutional Powers of the American Presidency While the greatest task of the American nation is self-preservation, the rights of peace should then be considered in submission to the exigencies of war. This does not lead to the withdrawal from the Constitution, as several analysts have asserted, but it could lead in a deferral of constitutional privileges of the individual since they go against with the ultimate powers of war. This power is exceptional; it is sternly constitutional, yet it batters every obstacle so restlessly put up for the safeguarding of liberty, property and life. Then, the current Supreme Court judgment merely eliminates the disparities from these arguments, and acknowledges the war powers as inherently extra-constitutional. It leads that the assets of the federal government with the powers of peripheral autonomy did not rely on the approval of the Constitution. The command to declare and wage war, to finish off peace, to sign agreements, to sustain diplomatic affairs with other self-governing nations, if they had by no means stated in the Constitution, would have been awarded in the federal government as obligatory affiliates of nationality (Genovese 2001). Therefore, ironically, the democracies of the Western nations which in the contemporary period approach the termination of decades-long economic and military emergency, and confront further decades in the boundary between war and peace, are provided a guiding assumption which takes into account emergency management as an irregularity, displacing the interactions and relationships between the different branches of government, and between superiors and subordinates which dominate in normal periods. In principle, the effort to safeguard inadequate and popularly accountable administration has previously been mislaid, for this is a lavishness that the American people were not told to afford. In the United States the American people have been particularly susceptible to approve of the supposed to be necessity for transformation from responsible to dictatorial government in incidences of emergency, for the people have nevertheless accepted a reading of the Constitution where subjected to the severe moderations forced by this means on governmental power are prone of negation in time of emergency, and on the contrary the people have with significant passiveness delegated to the Supreme Court the role of safeguarding the importance of constitutionalism and liberty through episodes of emergency. These two outlooks unite to improve the sense of exigency and calm the anxiety of allegedly provisional necessities to dictatorial government. An evaluation of the sufficiency with which independent government has, in the periodic economic and military exigencies since the early 1930s, merged enlistment of the rights of every citizen and of every physical resource at its control toward the purpose of national preservation and interests, with the safeguarding of fundamental individual liberties and the code of responsible administration which are the core of democracy, should in considerable proportion lie upon an evaluation of the substance of the statute documents. Its organization of legislative assignment of extra-constitutional powers to the Office of the President since 1933 should offer not merely implication of the degree to which coercive powers over individuals and property have been awarded the President for the sake of emergency, but as well as a model for the organization of a sequence of investigations into the use of extra-constitutional powers by the executive branch, and the effectiveness of congressional attempts to sustain responsible governance in times of emergency (Cronin 1998). III. Conclusion Leadership is complex accurately because the framers of the American Constitution sought after it, with the exception of emergencies, to be so. The brilliant men who created the presidency did not hope to invent a ruler; their familiarity with rulers of England discouraged them to this vision. Instead, they yearned to make the circumstances where leadership could from time to time thrive. A ruler directs; a head controls; a ruler exercises power; a leader encourages. Presidents have restricted and shared powers. The irony here is that people’s expectations are great, the American people demand extremely from their presidents, but the reserves at the disposal of the President are inadequate and the structure in which a President functions can effortlessly depress attempts at effective presidential leadership. References Cronin, T. E., (1998), The Paradoxes of the American Presidency, New York: Oxford University Press. Genovese, M. A., (2001), The Power of the American Presidency: 1789-2000, New York: Oxford University Press. Hargrove, E. C., (1974), The Power of the Modern Presidency, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Read More