Laws, Men and Machines: Modern American Government and the Appeal of Newtonian Mechanics by Michael Foley

Author:Michael Foley [Foley, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317829164
Google: kznKAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-02-04T10:36:07+00:00

decline in the status of the remaining two branches. Just as the gravitational pull of the sun could be gauged by the behaviour of the planets in the solar system, so, according to this way of seeing things, the magnitude of Presidential power could be determined through the movement and position of the Congress and Supreme Court.

Instead of the Presidency being viewed as an evolving entity growing through its own processes and assimilating new capabilities and forms in response to environmental forces, the office came to be seen far more as a uniform weight in a set of scales. Formally, the scales were a three-way device representing the three branches in the separation of powers scheme. In practice, however, the notion of balance was progressively simplified by recourse to a two-way equilibrium in which the counterweight to the Presidency was reduced to that of Congress. This was a reflection, first, of the judiciary's noted reluctance to engage itself in the political disputes surrounding the lines of demarcation between the two representational branches of government; and, second, of Congress's position as an institution whose political and electoral credentials were comparable to those of the Presidency and sufficient to allow the legislature to be identified as the executive's chief institutional adversary and potential counterweight. With this conception of legislative-executive relations, Congress could no longer be regarded as somehow developing in tandem with the Presidency, or of retaining its position while the Presidency advanced in its own right and through its own means. On the contrary, Presidential power became reduced to the conceptually manageable form of a physical force within a closed system, so that for every accretion of executive weight there was thought to be a directly related diminution of Congressional weight on a direct one-to-one basis. So far as the ‘imperial Presidency’ was concerned, it was not simply that it embodied a ‘shift in the constitutional balance – with … the appropriation by the Presidency … of powers reserved by the constitution and by long historical practice to Congress’.255 It was that ‘the central premise of the theory’ underlying the confrontation between the Presidency and Congress was ‘that the relationship was of a balance scale or zero-sum character, and … that a strong President must mean a weak Congress and vice versa’.256 The constitutional system may have been in an unbalanced condition, therefore, but at least the exact nature of that imbalance was thought to be known.

The second point follows on from the assumed zero-sum character of the linkage between the Presidency and the Congress. Given that the political system's malfunctions and misrule were largely attributed to the existence of an imbalance between the two institutions, it followed that such an imbalance must have developed from a condition of balance or something approximating to such a condition. The conception of balance, therefore, could be used not only to account in general terms for the phenomena but also to provide clear reasons for their presence. In the case of the ‘imperial Presidency’,

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