Politics
Taking Back Presidential Power

Taking Back Presidential Power

The president is presently considered the most powerful man on Earth, but our Republic was designed to give the president little power. This is how to restore power to the people. ...
Charles Scaliger

Every four years, Americans are treated to a tawdry, months-long spectacle pitting two typically (but not always) establishment-anointed candidates against one another for the ultimate prize: a four-year stint as the “most powerful person on Earth.” That, at least, is the establishment media’s term for the president of the United States. And it would have appalled the Founding Fathers and framers of the Constitution, who never intended to create in the office of the U.S. presidency a magistracy far more powerful than the English monarchy they had only recently shaken off.

But the de facto reality of modern America is that the executive branch of the U.S. government has usurped an enormous portion of government powers reserved by the Constitution in its original form to other branches of the federal government or to state governments. The president, for example, now sends U.S. troops into war at his personal whim, completely ignoring the constitutional stipulation that Congress issue a declaration of war first. A huge percentage of federal laws that control virtually every activity are issued in the form of federal regulations — which are created not by the legislative but by the executive branch of government, under the direction of the president.

The president also wields tremendous power with his authority to nominate Supreme Court justices — since the Supreme Court is regarded as a body whose decisions cannot be appealed or overturned. Presidents from FDR to the present have tried to customize the court to their preferred ideology, and the court has responded by issuing a range of unpopular decisions, from abortion on demand to the recent vindication of ObamaCare, that have left ordinary Americans frustrated and angry. By all accounts, the will of the people is systematically ignored by Washington, and there appears to be nothing that can change this state of affairs. This is the reason that every presidential race has become the ultimate high-stakes battle of partisan wills; the winner — and his party — will wield enormous de facto (if not de jure) power over the affairs of the nation and the world, and has the ability, via Supreme Court appointments, executive orders, involvement in foreign wars, regulations, and many other powers now accorded to him, to shape the destiny of the nation decades after his term in office ends.

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