The Rhetorical Presidency by Tulis Jeffrey

Author:Tulis, Jeffrey.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

REINTERPRETING THE CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLES: WOODROW WILSON’S STATECRAFT

Woodrow Wilson’s comprehensive reinterpretation of the constitutional order appears, on first glance, to be internally inconsistent. Between the writing of his classic dissertation Congressional Government in 1884, and the publication of his well-known series of lectures, Constitutional Government in the United States, in 1908, Wilson shifted his position on important structural features of the constitutional system.

Early in his career Wilson depicted the House of Representatives as the potential motive force in American politics, and he urged reforms to make it more unified and energetic. He paid little attention to the presidency or the judiciary. In later years he focused his attention on the presidency. In his early writings Wilson urged a plethora of constitutional amendments that were designed to emulate the British parliamentary system, including proposals to synchronize the terms of representatives and senators with that of the president and to require presidents to choose leaders of the majority party as cabinet secretaries. Later Wilson abandoned formal amendment as a strategy, urging instead that the existing Constitution be reinterpreted to encompass his parliamentary views.

The last shift reveals that Wilson had also altered his views at a deeper theoretical level. Christopher Wolfe has shown that while the “early” Wilson held a traditional view of the Constitution as a document whose meaning persists over time, the “later” Wilson adopted an historicist understanding, claiming that the meaning of the Constitution changed as a reflection of the prevailing thought of successive generations.2

As interesting as these shifts in Wilson’s thought are, they all rest upon an underlying critique of the American polity that he maintained consistently throughout his career. Wilson’s altered constitutional proposals, indeed his altered understanding of constitutionalism itself, ought to be viewed as a series of strategic moves designed to remedy the same alleged systemic defects. Our task here is to review Wilson’s understanding of those defects and to outline the doctrine he developed to contend with them—a doctrine whose centerpiece would ultimately be the rhetorical presidency.

Wilson’s doctrine can be nicely counterpoised to the founders’ understanding of demagoguery, representation, independence of the executive, and separation of powers. For clarity, these issues will be examined here in a slightly different order than before: separation of powers, representation, independence of the executive, and demagoguery.

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