December 19th, 2016 — In an interview in early December, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said that President-elect Donald Trump is committed to respecting the constitutional prerogatives of Congress. “We’ve talked about…the separation of powers,” he told “60 Minutes.” “He feels very strongly, actually, that under President Obama’s watch, he stripped a lot of power away from the Constitution, away from the legislative branch of government, and we want to reset the balance of power so that [the] people and the Constitution are rightfully restored.”
If history is any guide, Mr. Ryan’s optimism is misplaced.
During the election of 1912, the Progressive candidate, Theodore Roosevelt, articulated a populist defense of virtually unchecked executive power, declaring that the president is a “steward of the people” who can do anything that the Constitution does not explicitly forbid. Roosevelt’s rival, the Republican incumbent William Howard Taft, defended a far more constrained view of executive power, holding that the president could only do what the Constitution explicitly authorized.
Ever since the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Republican and Democratic presidents have embraced Theodore Roosevelt’s view, asserting ever more expansive visions of the president’s ability to do whatever he likes without congressional approval. Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama aggressively deployed executive power to circumvent Congress, and their partisans accepted it. During his own campaign, Mr. Trump declared, “I am your voice” and “I alone can fix it.” This is not the rhetoric of a president who intends to defer to the legislative branch.