Is the Presidency Driving Us Nuts?

[EasyAce]

For too long, both Democrats and Republicans have treated the president like an elected king, omniscient and all-powerful.
By Jay Cost
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455218/trump-obama-derangement-syndrome-rooted-myth-president-king

Another week, another episode of As the Trump Turns, the parody of a soap opera that our government has become. This week’s installment revolves around Michael Wolff’s new tell-all book, Fire and Fury.

I have no intention of reading this book or lingering on its details. I don’t really care if it’s true, false, or something in between. Instead, I’m more interested in the acute derangement that Donald Trump continues to produce within our political system.

It is not good when a body politic is so susceptible to being confounded as the United States has been. We can, of course, blame Trump — or his opponents, depending on your political predilections — but I think there is also an institutional cause for our discontents. The fact that any president could rile up the nation as Trump has is an illustration of how overgrown the executive power has become.

The notion of “coequal branches” is a 20th-century invention. For most of the nation’s history prior to the Great Depression, the president played second fiddle to Congress. This was by constitutional design. The Framers envisioned the legislature, not the president, as the fount of republican authority, and they designed a government accordingly. The presidents we recall from the first century of American history — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln — are exceptions to the general rule . . .

. . . Congress is the first branch of government, as set out in the first article of the Constitution. Yet our Congress today, most of us would agree, is a total embarrassment. Maybe that has something to do with the fact that, for more than a half-century, we have spent most of our civic energy fussing over the executive branch.

The optimist in me wants to believe that Trump’s tenure in office will help people realize that the executive office is now too big and powerful for a republic such as ours. By operating a burlesqued version of the modern administration, maybe Trump is revealing the many institutional flaws that have long been extant. Perhaps people will finally realize that the executive needs to be scaled back, and Congress should be reformed and restored.

That’s my hope, at any rate. Fanciful, I know, but stranger things have happened, right?