T.R.'s pronouncement that even the president is not above criticism is as admirable as his expansions of
presidential authority and his lament that the absence of war and general domestic tranquility denied
him a true shot at greatness are deplorable.
A man has to take advantage of his opportunities, but the opportunities have to come. If there
is not the war, you don't get the great general; if there is not the great occasion, you don't get the
great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in times of peace, no one would know his name now.---T.R.,
who also envied Woodrow Wilson---as Gene Healy noted in The Cult of the Presidency-because
Wilson got to fight World War I, the war T.R. had hoped to see.
And if you ponder the promiscuity of the executive order as evidence of a president believing himself
above the Constitution's distinction between the executive and the legislative branches, consider
that there were only 158 presidential executive orders between the end of the Civil War and Roosevelt's
first election to the White House,
but that TR himself issued 1,006.
TR's promiscuous use of executive orders followed from his expansive theory of
presidential prerogatives; as he'd later explain, he believed that the president had a
broad general power to do good.---Healy.
By 1912, when he was running on the Progressive/Bull Moose ticket after falling out with former friend
William Howard Taft, Roosevelt had an even more expansive view of the presidency:
In order to succeed, we need leaders of inspired idealism, leaders to whom
are granted great visions, who dream greatly and strive to make their dreams come
true; who can kindle the people with the fire from their own burning souls . . . You
who strive in a spirit of brotherhood for the betterment of our nation, to you who gird
yourselves for this great new fight in the never-ending warfare for the good of
humankind, I say in closing . . . We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the
Lord!---TR, at the Progressive Party convention of 1912.
Taft, of course, had no taste for his old friend's expansive view:
Ascribing an undefined residuum of power to the President is an unsafe
doctrine and . . . might lead under emergencies to results of an arbitrary
character, doing irremediable injustice to private right. The mainspring of such
a view is that the executive is charged with responsibility for the welfare of all
the people in a general way, that he is to play the part of a universal
Providence and set all things right, and that anything that in his judgment
will help the people he ought to do, unless he is expressly forbidden not to
do it. The wide field of action that this would give to the executive, one can
hardly limit.
---William Howard Taft, in Our Chief Magistrate and His Powers.
Taft himself wasn't exactly a
perfect tribune of the limits of presidential power, of course, and
his support of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments indicated a progressive bent, too.
So why don't we remember him as a "heroic, reformist president," in Healy's phrase?
Easy---there was no war into which to step during his administration, and maybe the worst
kept secret of his time was that he actually despised politics. ("He was where he was,"
Healy writes, "due to intellect, ability, and the incessant prodding of an ambitious wife. But
on the whole, he'd rather have been on the Supreme Court [a wish fulfilled in 1921 when
President Harding named him chief justice].")
It's comforting to know TR wouldn't have had me bastinadoed for criticising him and his view
of his office, but it's anything but comforting to recall he had just the kind of view of his office
that compels a Jacob Sullum to warn against taking the office and its holder so seriously as to
continue the perpetration of the saviour presidency.
Forget about making America "great" again. How's about letting America be America again?
