Our ‘imperial’ presidents, thankfully, aren’t Caesars
In the eight years of the Obama presidency, there were three cycles of policymaking. First came the attempt to pass an ambitious liberal agenda through a Democratic-controlled Congress, which ended with the Republican House takeover in 2010. Then came the attempt to strike bargains, grand and otherwise, with John Boehner and congressional Republicans, which petered out early in Barack Obama’s second term. And finally came the imperial phase, in which activists appealed to the president to claim powers that he had previously abjured, and override or sidestep congressional gridlock on immigration, climate policy and health care through the power of the presidential pen.
Under Donald Trump the imperial phase might arrive much sooner. The possibility for further ambitious conservative legislation seems to have died away already; it’s hard to imagine Trump successfully making deals with Democrats if his party loses the House in November, and so two years may stretch ahead of us in which literally nothing passes Congress except budget deals.
In the last few weeks we’ve had a preview of how pro-Trump voices will fill that vacuum — with appeals that mirror the appeals of liberal activists in the late Obama years. Dear Mr. President, don’t you realize that you have the power to do (thing that most people assume the president doesn’t have the power to do)? Dear Mr. President, fortune favors the bold. Dear Mr. President, just act.
For instance, two weeks ago Michael Anton, erstwhile national security staffer and “Flight 93 Election” essayist, took to The Washington Post with the claim that birthright citizenship isn’t required by the 14th Amendment — and that therefore the president himself, through his constitutional powers, can end jus soli via executive fiat.
Meanwhile, cheered on by supply-siders, Trump is considering using a power that previous Republican administrations felt the president did not possess to cut investment taxes sharply by indexing capital gains calculation to inflation.
I wrote a lot, sometimes shrilly, about liberal Caesarism in the late Obama years, and the ideas being urged on Trump would represent the right-wing version of that tendency. For observers in the market for authoritarian scenarios, they also point to the surest path to a real constitutional crisis in our staggering republic: an aggressive president who first claims new powers to fill the void where Congress used to work, and then defies the other branches, the courts especially, when they attempt to check his ambitions.
In countries where an imperial presidency transitions to an authoritarian one, the transition often happens precisely because the imperial president has strong popular support. The original Caesar was dangerous because he was beloved, and a country like Venezuela is where it is today because Hugo Chávez was able to win thumping-big electoral victories throughout his constitutional aggressions, on a scale that no recent U.S. president has been able to achieve or sustain.
So long as that kind of popularity eludes our chief executives, their unilateralism is more likely to be a driver of dysfunction — encouraging wild swings from presidency to presidency, impeding policy certainty and follow-through — than a greased slope to presidential tyranny.