Want To Lower the Political Temperature? Make the Presidency Less Important
Over the past decade pundits have written much about how to reduce the polarization and rancor in America, and now after the re-election of Donald Trump we’re sure to hear even more about civility and finding common ground. But there’s one solution to partisan political sectarianism that doesn’t require listening to your uncle’s opinions about drag queens: reducing the power and importance of the presidency in American life.
To be clear, the need to rein in the executive branch did not suddenly appear when Trump was elected. The best day to limit executive power was yesterday, but today will do just as well. The plain fact is that Trump will re-enter an Oval Office that is more powerful than it has ever been—the beneficiary of decades of accumulated privileges ceded to the executive branch by an apathetic Congress and an unserious Supreme Court.
The problem that Trump gleefully daydreams about using the state to retaliate against his many critics and political enemies is downstream of the problem that the Office of the President gives him the power to indulge his fantasies.
As Gene Healy, author of The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power, recently wrote for the Cato Institute, “The presidency itself has become a central fault line of polarization because the president, increasingly, has the power to reshape vast swaths of American life.”
The first priority should be limiting the damage caused by the Supreme Court ruling earlier this year in Trump v. U.S., which granted the president immunity from prosecution for nebulously defined “official acts.” A constitutional amendment putting the president in his correct place, under the rule of law like every other American, would be preferable, but that would require a two-thirds majority vote in both the House and Senate followed by ratification by three-fourths of the states, a level of bipartisan agreement that now only occurs in Aaron Sorkin’s private fantasies.
Democrats introduced the “No Kings Act” earlier this year to ostensibly check the Supreme Court, but the legislat
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