I have been informed by several commenters that the beliefs about the limits of presidential power held by pretty much everyone to have studied the issue have been proven wrong. I am especially happy to provide the link, as I can’t imagine a better (if inadvertent) case that there was no plausible path to a […]
Tag: presidential power
I strongly recommend John Sides’s post, and for that matter I also strongly recommend On Deaf Ears and the Strategic Presidency, the most essential readings about the presidency this side of Nue
Elias Isquith is very agitated about one of the points in this post, which may be due to a lack of clarity on my part. To provide said clarity, I should emphasize that I am not saying that the p
I think this comment from David Mizner — whose excellent novel you should check out — gets to the heart of the issue: This argument — could President Obama have gotten progressive bills through? — is ultimately unknowable because he didn’t try. That’s the problem. On his 3 big bills — the stimulus, health care, […]
I find myself in an unusual position of arguing that someone is underestimating presidential power. Armando asserts that I argue that we shouldn’t care who is president. So, working backward fro
Given that making an argument on the merits that there is an “imperial presidency” on domestic as well as foreign policy is essentially impossible, as you can see from these comment thread
Matt has some useful additions to my post yesterday on presidential power. On the second term, one could add the the 2005 bankruptcy “reform,” which again involved legislation supported by powerful interests, an issue that doesn’t divide the Republican coalition, and key support from parasite-state Democrats. Where one of these conditions wasn’t present, Bush’s allegedly […]
Scott of course is right about the Green Lantern theory of domestic politics. There’s just no way Obama is going to will Ben Nelson or Olympia Snowe into supporting a given policy. Giving speech
I have more to say about what the presidency and what it can and can’t accomplish based on Jeff Shessol’s terrific book on FDR and the court-packing fight. But since I have a couple dea
Since I was accused by a couple people in the last presidential power thread of creating a strawman, I should note that David Sirota and especially Drew Westen have provided the latest very real examples of people asserting that FDR imposed an uncompromising liberal agenda on Congress. (Westen, needless to say, mentions the “I welcome […]
It won’t surprise most readers to know that my reactions to some of the responses to Corey Robin’s informal roundtable are pretty similar to Matt’s. The idea that there’s
Ezra: Let’s agree that what matters isn’t how many jobs you “get caught trying” to create, but how many jobs you actually create. There’s virtually no evidence that if Obama makes more speec