Has the President Usurped the Constitutional Authority of Congress?

Written by  Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.
Monday, 20 June 2016

On June 16, a Minnesota Public Radio news program held a debate on this timely question: Has the president usurped the power of Congress? 

With the presidential election fewer than five months from now and in light of promises made by both major party candidates about what they will do in their “first 100 days,” it is important to review the powers granted to that office by the states when they created the federal government in the Constitution.

Before beginning to offer a brief, constitutionally based answer to that question, Americans concerned about the rise of the “imperial president” may study the words and warnings of our Founding Fathers and their political and philosophical influences regarding the primacy of the separation of powers in a good government.

James Madison, writing as "Publius," stated in The Federalist, No. 47: “The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.“

Madison himself was restating in his inimitable style, one facet of federalism that was universally considered to be an essential pillar of liberty.

As the venerable French philosopher Baron de Montesquieu wrote in his influential treatise The Spirit of the Laws, “When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.”

"Centinel," an anti-Federalist writer, opposed to ratifying the new Constitution, rephrased for his readers what was already, in the 18th century, a well-settled aspect of good government, “This mixture of the legislative and executive moreover highly tends to corruption. The chief improvement in government, in modern times, has been the complete separation of the great distinctions of power; placing the legislative in different hands from those which hold the executive.”

Another anonymous anti-Federalist commented,  “Liberty therefore can only subsist, where the powers of government are properly divided, and where the different jurisdictions are inviolably kept distinct and separate.”

That said, it is little to be disputed that presidents for decades have exercised lawmaking power, all of which was granted in the Constitution only to the Congress. Presidents have pushed the boundaries of their powers beyond the pale of consent of the governed and have consolidated some level of control over every aspect of human life. That this propensity existed and that it could, if realized, become the catalyst for autocracy was recognized by the men of the Founding Generation, who warned of the dangers to liberty posed by a power-hungry president. Here are just a few examples of their timely and timeless words.

During the debates on ratification of the Constitution, several opponents of that document warned of the danger lurking in a lawmaking president.

Governor George Clinton of New York wrote an extremely prescient warning regarding the danger latent in the office of the presidency as defined by the Constitution:

He will be surrounded by expectants and courtiers, his power of nomination and influence on all appointments, the strong posts in each state comprised within his superintendence and garrisoned by troops under his direction, his control over the army, militia, and navy, the unrestrained power of granting pardons for treason which may be used to screen from punishment those whom he had secretly instigated to commit the crime and thereby prevent discovery of his own quiet, his duration in office for four years; these and various other principles evidently prove the truth of the position that if the president is possessed of ambition, he has power and time sufficient to ruin his country.

And:

Experience ought to teach you that when a man is at the head of an elective government, invested with great powers and interested in his re-election, in what circle appointments will be made, by which means an imperfect aristocracy bordering on monarchy may be established.

Ben Franklin, a friend of the Constitution, made a similar observation. “The executive will always be increasing here, as elsewhere, till it ends in monarchy,” Franklin warned.

Read more.....http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/23448-has-the-president-usurped-the-constitutional-authority-of-congress