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I've lived through 15 presidencies so far, from Franklin Delano Roosevelt's (not that I would remember him, since I was born in July 1944, and he died in April 1945) to Joe Biden's. The first president I remember was former World War II general Dwight D. Eisenhower (whose vice president, god save us all, was future Watergate President Richard Nixon). In fact, I can still recall the election ditty I learned to sing at home during Eisenhower's 1956 race for reelection against Democrat Adlai Stevenson.
Whistle while you work,
Nixon is a jerk,
Eisenhower has no power,
Stevenson will work!
Of course, Stevenson, the former governor of Illinois and a liberal Democrat, didn't work, not faintly, in that election and, as TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg points out today, Eisenhower already had far too much power when it came to the U.S. role in the world. During his presidency, in fact, he would launch one devastating covert operation after another globally without bothering to consult Congress for a moment.
Still, in all those early years, whatever did happen, I never could have imagined someone like Donald Trump becoming president of the United States (or being reelected), nor could my parents have. (I often think about bringing them back from the dead to try to explain or, since I still can hardly believe it myself, at least describe The Donald and what he's done.) Nor could they have imagined an American election in which, unless he won (which, all too sadly, he did), he'd automatically claim (as he was already doing almost a week before election day) "voter fraud," nor the likelihood that a presidential candidate might actually consider calling on his armed followers to dispute an election result.
Though I began writing this introduction before the 2024 election results were even in, I already knew that, no matter who won, I was in another America. And as it happens, one in which the power of the president has reached new (and this is far too kind a word for it) heights -- depths would undoubtedly be more appropriate -- as Greenberg describes so vividly, if grimly, today. How sad, given that Donald Trump is now returning to the Oval Office. Tom
It's Not Just About the President
It's About the Presidency
As the dust settles over election day, it's worth reflecting that it's not only the election results that have been at stake, but the future of the presidency and its powers. Over the course of the first quarter of this century, the American presidency has accumulated ever more power, rendering the office increasingly less constrained by either Congress or the courts. With Donald Trump's reelection, the slide toward a dangerously empowered president has reached a moment of reckoning, particularly when it comes to foreign affairs and warfare.
Presidential Powers
Throughout American history, presidents have repeatedly sought to increase their powers, nowhere more so than in the context of war. As historian James Patterson has pointed out, "War and the threat of war were major sources of presidential power from the beginning." Whether it was George Washington's insistence that he was the one to formulate foreign policy when it came to diplomacy, treaties, and more; Thomas Jefferson's assertion of complete control over whether or not to attack the Barbary Pirates; James Polk's decision to take actions which risked war with Mexico; or Abraham Lincoln's "sweeping assertions of authority" in the Civil War era, executive claims to authority when it comes to matters of foreign relations and warfare have been a persistent feature of American history.
The twentieth century saw a continued rise in the powers of the presidency. As historian Jeremi Suri noted in his book The Impossible Presidency, the four terms of Franklin D. Roosevelt were a transformative moment, essentially multiplying the responsibilities of the president with the ultimate goal of "mak[ing] the national executive the dominant actor in all parts of American life." The presidents who followed Roosevelt continued to display such enhanced powers, especially when it came to foreign affairs.
As legal scholar Matt Waxman has reminded us, FDR's successor, Harry Truman, went to war in Korea without congressional authorization. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who did consult with Congress over the need to protect U.S.-allied Pacific coastal islands from possible Chinese aggression and, in his farewell address, warned against "the military-industrial complex," still believed "that the president had broad powers to engage in covert warfare without specific congressional approval." In fact, his successor, John F. Kennedy, exercised those powers in a major way in the Bay of Pigs incident. Richard Nixon unilaterally and secretly launched the invasion of Cambodia in 1970, and Ronald Reagan created a secret Central American foreign policy, while arranging the unauthorized transfer of funds and weaponry to the Nicaraguan rebels, the Contras, from the sale of U.S. arms to Iran, despite the fact that such funding was prohibited by an act of Congress, the Boland Amendment.
The Twenty-First Century
Even within the context of repeated presidential acts taken without congressional assent (or often even knowledge) and in defiance of the constitutional checks on the powers of the presidency, the twenty-first century witnessed a major uptick in claims of executive power. In the name of war, this century has seen an astonishing erosion of constraints on that very power, as Yale law professor Harold Hongju Koh details in his illuminating new book, The National Security Constitution in the Twenty-First Century.
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