Title: The ever-expanding power of the presidency - Washington Times
Headings: The ever-expanding power of the presidency
The ever-expanding power of the presidency
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Content: During deep recessions, Presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter established government controls on wages and prices, and started massive new agencies regulating occupational safety, energy and the environment, thus exerting federal control over entire sectors of the private economy. After the Sept. 11 terror attacks, President George W. Bush established the Homeland Security Agency with broad powers that have consistently tested constitutional limits. He also promoted a prescription-drug entitlement to Medicare, and significantly increased federal involvement in education, despite its being historically a local or state issue. But it is not always a crisis that results in expanded executive power: Sometimes it is just the president’s belief that the public will accept it. A recent example is President Obama’s executive actions promising the nonenforcement of certain immigration laws. But there is also the undeniable effect of the bully pulpit controlled by the president. When a president declares, as this president has for example, that health care insurance is a right, and presidential candidates propose to expand nearly universal education rights forward from elementary and secondary education to the college level, citizens ungrounded in the explicit constitutional limits of executive power become increasingly compliant to the repeated assertion of these newly pronounced rights — which are not delineated in the Constitution. This has had a cumulative effect on the electorate and its view of the presidency. You may approve of the expansion of the powers of the presidency, or you may not.