Supreme Warlord of the Earth

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It’s difficult for 21st-century Americans to imagine things any other way. The United States appears to be stuck with an imperial presidency, an office that concentrates enormous power in the hands of whichever professional politician manages to claw his way to the top. Americans appear deeply ambivalent about the results, alternately cursing the king and pining for Camelot. But executive power will continue to grow, and threats to civil liberties increase, until citizens reconsider the incentives we have given to a post that started out so humbly.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The modern vision of the presidency couldn’t be further from the view of the chief executive’s role held by the framers of the Constitution. In an age long before distrust of power was condemned as cynicism, the founding fathers designed a presidency of modest authority and limited responsibilities. The Constitution’s architects never conceived of the president as the person in charge of national destiny. They worked amid the living memory of monarchy, and for them the very notion of “national leadership” raised the possibility of authoritarian rule by a demagogue ready to create an atmosphere of crisis in order to enhance his power.

The constitutional office they designed gave the president an important role, but “no particle of spiritual jurisdiction,” the 69th essay of The Federalist Papers tells us. In Federalist No. 48, James Madison assured Americans that under the proposed Constitution the “executive magistracy is carefully limited, both in the extent and the duration of its powers.” Never were constitutional limitations more essential than when it came to using military power. Early Americans were no strangers to national security threats; in 1787 the United States was a small frontier republic. Yet the Constitution limited emergency powers and sharply rejected the idea that the president was above the law. “In no part of the Constitution,” Madison wrote in 1793, “is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department.” In any other arrangement, “the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man.”

Today Americans expect their president to pound Teddy Roosevelt’s “bully pulpit,” whipping the electorate into a frenzy to harness power against perceived threats. But the framers viewed that sort of behavior as fundamentally illegitimate. In fact, the president wasn’t even supposed to be a popular leader. As presidential scholar Jeffrey K. Tulis has pointed out, in The Federalist Papers the term leader is nearly always used pejoratively; the essays by Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay in defense of the Constitution begin and end with warnings about the perils of populist leadership.

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