Richard W. Stevenson: Presidential Power, Bush Style

Richard W. Stevenson, in the NYT (5-15-05):

Presidential power has always been as much a function of circumstance, personality and political skill as of constitutional prerogative. In a landmark Supreme Court decision in 1952, Justice Robert H. Jackson, assessing how power migrates between the branches of government, invoked Napoleon's maxim, "The tools belong to the man who can use them."

George W. Bush has not been shy about seizing those tools, whether in their constitutional, policy-making or political forms. Just last week, he won a big victory when a federal appeals court unanimously affirmed a president's right to conduct much of his business behind closed doors. In the coming week, the White House will tacitly support efforts by Senate Republicans to stop Democrats from using the threat of filibusters to block Mr. Bush's judicial nominees, a change that would strip from the Senate one of its points of leverage over the executive branch.

The president has clearly been trying to harness and expand the clout available to him and to present his office as even more the seat of power than it was under many of his predecessors. By many standards he has succeeded, in part through the good fortune of having a Republican Congress to work with, in part because of his role as commander in chief at a time of threats to the nation and in part because of his aggressive style of advancing his agenda and political interests.

The question that has yet to be answered is whether he has fundamentally altered the presidency in ways that will outlast his tenure and wipe out the remaining legacies of Vietnam and Watergate, which were taken as object lessons in the dangers of a too powerful, too secret executive.

"He has gained power both informally and permanently for the next person in the office, and he has done it more than any president since L.B.J.," said James Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University in Washington.

Mr. Bush has claimed for himself power to set policy on the detention and interrogation of people caught up in the battle against terrorism. He has used executive power to make changes to environmental policy through rule making and regulatory changes on issues from clean air and water to road building on federal lands that had previously been off limits. He has fought to protect the ability of the administration to block Congress from calling White House aides to testify, and has moved to limit release of historical presidential papers.

In purely political terms, Mr. Bush has established a new standard for claiming a mandate from even the narrowest of electoral victories, asserting that his slim victory in 2000, never mind his much clearer win last year, was license to pursue an ambitious rethinking of economic and social policy along conservative lines. According to figures compiled by Congressional Quarterly and cited by Mr. Thurber, Mr. Bush in his first term had the best record of getting his initiatives through Congress of any president since Johnson.

Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter were most obviously restrained by the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam climate. Ronald Reagan reclaimed much of the grandeur and authority of the office, but then was set back by scandal and confrontations with Congress. Mr. Bush's father never exerted the same clout in domestic policy and politics as he did in foreign affairs, and Bill Clinton was hobbled by a Republican Congress and the effects of his dalliance with an intern....