Title: Powers of the President | Scholastic
Headings: Powers of the President
Powers of the President
Content: Personality characteristics may, for example, cause a president to work very hard, but without being attuned to public sentiment. The strivings of these individuals may become so compulsive as to lead to the rigid - and futile - pursuit of a policy. Woodrow Wilson, for example, took an absolute stand on the League of Nations, rejecting compromises that might have saved much of his project in the Senate. How the president uses power may also depend on the president's own conception of the office. Some presidents, such as James Buchanan or William Howard Taft, have interpreted their powers narrowly, declining to act unless power was specifically granted in the Constitution or in statutes. At the other extreme are the presidents who, like Theodore Roosevelt, feel constrained in their "stewardship" only by what is expressly forbidden by the Constitution. The Current Issue of Executive Power. After the long, drawn-out, and eventually unpopular Vietnam War and the excesses of Watergate, the presidency passed into an era of criticism and reassessment. The office was seen to have become inordinately powerful and to be threatening civil liberties. It was viewed as having placed the political system in disequilibrium by drawing excessive power to the presidency at the expense of the other branches.