Abstract
As presidential scholar Thomas Cronin once pointed out, the president of the United States is expected to play many roles.1 Because of the vagaries of Article II, the constitutional provision that establishes the presidency, much of what the president does is subject to interpretation. In the last chapter I examined the president’s evolving role as legislative leader. Only in the last century or so has the president become a leader in proposing, shepherding, and shaping legislative proposals so that now in the modern era, the president becomes the nation’s chief legislator. But there was never any doubt that the president is above all else, the nation’s chief executive. It says so right in the Constitution.
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Notes
Thomas E. Cronin, On the Presidency: Teacher, Soldier, Shaman, Pol (Paradigm Publishers, 2008), pp. 1–56.
These results conform to previous research in Kenneth R. Mayer, “Executive Orders and Presidential Power,” The Journal of Politics 61 (2) (1999): 445–66.
Source, US government, Federal Register, “Executive Orders Disposition Tables,” Jimmy Carter—1981. http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/executive-orders/1981-carter.html (last accessed August 19, 2013).
See William G. Howell and Kenneth R. Mayer, “The Last One Hundred Days,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 35(3) (September 1, 2005): 533–553; 542.
A proclamation differs from an executive order to the extent that a proclamation applies to actors outside the government and an executive order applies exclusively to the activities of the federal government. Brandon Rottinghaus and Jason Maier, “The Power of Decree: Presidential Use of Executive Proclamations, 1977–2005,” Political Research Quarterly 60(2) (June 1, 2007): 338–343.
Adams to Boudinot quoted in Page Smith, John Adams: 1784–1826 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1962), p. 1064.
On this point, see Patricia W. Ingraham, James R. Thompson, and Elliot F. Eisenberg, “Political Management Strategies and Polical/Career Relationships: Where Are We Now in the Federal Government?” Public Administration Review 55 (3) (1995): 263–272.
See B. Dan Wood and Miner P. Marchbanks, “What Determines How Long Political Appointees Serve?” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 18 (3) (2008): 375–396.
See James P. Pfiffner, “Political Appointees and Career Executives: The Democracy-Bureaucracy Nexus in the Third Century,” Public Administration Review 47 (1) (1987): 57–65.
and David E. Lewis, “Testing Pendleton’s Premise: Do Political Appointees Make Worse Bureaucrats?” The Journal of Politics 69 (4) (2007): 1073–1088.
Ronald N. Johnson and Gary D. Libecap, “Patronage to Merit and Control of the Federal Government Labor Force,” Explorations in Economic History 31 (1) (1994): 91–119.
See James L. Butkiewicz, “The Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the Gold Standard, and the Banking Panic of 1933,” Southern Economic Journal 66 (2) (1999): 271–293.
Quoted in Arthur Meier Schlesinger, The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933 (Harcourt: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 2.
For a first-hand account of this cooperation, see Francis Gloyd Awalt, “Recollections of the Banking Crisis in 1933,” The Business History Review 43 (3) (1969): 347–371.
For this decision and others, Jefferson was often branded a coward. Josiah Quincy, a Federalist in Congress, wrote to former president Adams describing Jefferson as “a dish of skim-milk curdling at the head of state.” This is quoted in Fawn A. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (New York: WW Norton, 1974), p. 414.
Jefferson then made a special point of telling the French ambassador how much he admired the French people while pointedly failing to mention their emperor. About Napoleon Jefferson once said, “I have grieved to see even good republicans so infatuated as to this man, as to consider his downfall as calamitous to the cause of liberty.” This letter from Jefferson to Benjamin Austin, dated January 9, 1816, was reproduced in H. A. Washington, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (BiblioBazaar, 2010) at http://www.yamaguchy.com/library/jefferson/austin.html (last accessed October 23, 2013).
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© 2014 Daniel P. Franklin
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Franklin, D.P. (2014). Leaving Presidents and the Administrative State. In: Pitiful Giants. The Evolving American Presidency Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137408242_3
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