Hillarysworld

Members Login

Post Info

TOPIC: The Difference Between a President and a King (RCP 3/20/10)

Jen the Michigander

SuperModerator

Status: Offline

Posts: 1788

Date: Mar 21, 2010

The Difference Between a President and a King (RCP 3/20/10)	Permalink

http://realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/03/20/the_difference_between_a_president_and_a_king_104859.html D.C. Examiner online opinion editor David Freddoso was then covering Capitol Hill for Human Events. He told me he had talked to Iowa Congressman Steve King “on the phone maybe three hours before the vote. King said he absolutely was going to vote against it and then he voted for it.” King wasn’t alone. Several holdouts caved at the last minute, leading Freddoso to be extremely skeptical of any publicly announced whip counts on bills that the president cares about. The congressmen caved because of the tremendous pressure the president brought to bear on members of his own party. In one case, Bush’s operatives sent letters to all the big financial donors of one stubborn Republican opponent, telling them not to give him money. If you believe Obama is above that sort of thing, drop me an e-mail. We should talk about a timeshare. This is not how the presidency was supposed to work, argues Gene Healy, a vice president at the libertarian Cato Institute and author of The Cult of the Presidency. The president was supposed to be a “limited constitutional officer,” not the man who “sets the national agenda” and “bullies Congress into submission” through his media provided pulpit or through more direct pressures. Certainly, said Healy, many of our early presidents were involved in the details of legislation but the “niceties that had to be observed” forbade the sort of threats and speech making that many recent presidents have been so keen on. “For most of the nineteenth century,” Healy told me Tuesday, “the legislature was in the driver’s seat.” In fact, Andrew Jackson, the first president to really embrace the bully pulpit, inspired a whole new political party to rise up against his allegedly tyrannical rule. Healy observed that the founders would have considered Obama’s recent harangue in Ohio – in which the president ordered Congress to damn the polls and pass the legislation, already – “the height of demagoguery.” __________________ Nobody puts THIS baby in the corner!

Page 1 of 1 sorted by

Tweet this page

Post to Digg

Post to Del.icio.us

Create your own FREE Forum
Report Abuse