Power and the U.S. presidency

In the wake of the latest US budget crisis, a fed-up President Barack Obama said to his opponents, “You don't like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election.”

In the past few months, Obama has been taken to task for what critics see as an autocratic use of presidential proclamations and executive orders. But such actions are nothing new, argues Graham Dodds, a political science professor at Concordia.

Throughout U.S. history, presidents have used unilateral directives to impose controversial policies, and Congress and the courts have seldom resisted, says Dodds. His new book, Take Up Your Pen: Unilateral Presidential Directives in American Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), chronicles how laws came to be made by a mere stroke of the pen. Dodds also studied the impact of these directives.

“In unilateral presidential directives, we see a dramatic expansion of presidential power that rests on vague justifications and has gone relatively unchecked,” he explains. “This development has roots in the constitution’s ambiguity and the character of executive power.”

Although the U.S. constitution does not itself mention unilateral presidential directives, the judiciary first endorsed their constitutionality when the nation was only 23 years old. “That means that the status of these directives is bound up with the broader question of the scope of executive power,” says Dodds.

Despite its early acceptance, presidents did not make use of the new policymaking tool for some time. But Dodds found that the nature of unilateral presidential directives changed dramatically with Theodore Roosevelt, who saw them as the perfect way to implement his “stewardship” view of the presidency at the vanguard of an active government.

“Roosevelt issued almost as many executive orders as all of his predecessors combined, and he did so for controversial purposes, provoking sharp conflicts with Congress.”

The regular use of unilateral presidential directives became well established over the next half-dozen presidencies. Although the number of executive orders declined, the use of these directives has figured prominently in areas like national security, labor, civil rights and environmental protection.

Take Up Your Pen sheds light on several long-standing debates — about the roots of presidential power, the modern presidency and the nature of political development, among other subjects.

According to Dodds, “the development of unilateral presidential directives is not some minor, isolated phenomenon; rather, it influences and is influenced by much of what is important and interesting in American politics. Even with evolving issue areas, periodic congressional resistance, and the occasional court case striking down a directive, odds are that presidents will continue to use unilateral directives for significant purposes for decades to come.”