Title: American presidential power is not leading to dictatorship.
Headings: Is America Heading Toward Dictatorship?
Is America Heading Toward Dictatorship?
Presidents have more power today, but there are good historical reasons for the trend.

Content: The only answer is that the president’s special constitutional position entitles him to some degree of deference from the other branches of government. Advertisement
A minor but telling tempest brewed in a teapot in 2006 when the Bush administration was accused of fomenting a “ constitutional crisis ” by issuing statements that interpreted portions of bills narrowly when he signed them. In fact, presidents had issued such signing statements for decades. The statements have no legal status—they are not enforceable in court, for example. They simply state how the executive plans to go about implementing statutes, reflecting legal interpretations that the executive must make in order to fit the statutes to circumstances. As far as I know, no one has ever shown that Bush’s signing statements deprived anyone of his legal rights, and Obama has continued this practice. Advertisement
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Even more to the point, when you try to identify the most important and controversial actions of Bush and Obama, all of them involve congressional consent. For Bush, Congress authorized the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the expansion of surveillance and detention authorities, a major tax cut, No Child Left Behind, and $700 billion to bail out the financial system in 2008. For Obama, Congress authorized a $787 billion stimulus plan, the Affordable Care Act, and a major overhaul of financial regulation. The presidents’ unilateral actions were incremental or interstitial—acting sometimes ahead of congressional authorization, modifying laws in light of changed circumstances and bureaucratic imperatives, building on existing authorities.