6
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meaning of the words and the intentions of the framers are problematic because the
Framers designed a system of government based on legislative supremacy, but the
presidency has accumulated vast powers. The legislative supremacy model originally
implied a principal-agent relationship where the executive agent has a constitutional duty
to carry out the legislative principal’s will (Whittington), but this is not how modern
governance works in domestic or foreign affairs.
5
The 19
th
century “clerkship” view of
the presidency, which Chief Justice Vinson derisively called the “messenger-boy
concept” of the presidency,
6
faded with Teddy Roosevelt’s “stewardship” theory and
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “highly muscular view of presidential discretion” (Bledsoe,
Watts, and Rozell, 514).
The Court has acknowledged the fact of presidentialism. In a concurring opinion
in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579, 653 (1952), Jackson took
judicial notice of the fact that “vast accretions” of federal power widened “the gap that
exists between the President’s paper powers and his real powers….[and exposed the
Constitution] “as an Eighteenth-Century sketch of a government hoped for, not as a
blueprint of the Government that is….”
The Justices have been keenly aware of the essentially non-constitutional nature
of presidential powers in times of crisis such as war and depression. From the 1930s to
the 1960s political conservatives were viewed as reactionary partly because they were
such strong critics of presidential government and the plebiscitary democracy upon which
5
The f
ear of caesarism is a recurring theme in American politics. The Republican elephant first appeared in
an 1874 Thomas Nast illustration that depicted the dangers of Caesarism. See Guide to the Presidency, 3
rd
ed, Vol. 1, Michael Nelson (ed.). Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Inc., p.795.
6
Dissenting in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952).
Convention