Commenting on a Michael Tomasky piece that repeats many of the same complaints that Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd have made of late about the Obama Presidency, Jazz Shaw asks a question:
All of this brings us back our joint entry and exit question: can a sitting president ever become completely irrelevant in American politics? And has Barack Obama already achieved that dubious distinction?
Notwithstanding the bungling of the Obama Administration, and the fact the President has either ceded control of domestic legislation to Congress (i.e, the 2009 stimulus and health care form) or surrendered to the Republicans with barely a fight (i.e., extension of the Bush tax cuts, resolution of the FY2011 budget, and the debt ceiling extension), I think the answer has to be a fairly emphatic no. Even a politically weak President with a low job approval rating in a time of economic uncertainty retains a certain level power, both that granted by the Constitution and that assumed by Presidents over the past 221 years, still retains a significant amount of power in both the foreign and economic policy arenas. Calling him (or, one day, her) irrelevant is a nice turn of phrase, but it isn’t at all accurate.
The easiest argument against the “irrelevant Presidency” argument, of course, comes in the foreign policy arena. The President’s powers as Commander-in-Chief, combined with the fact that Congress has largely ceded any role in this particular arena since the end of World War II to the Executive, means that any President has significant authority to both commit American forces around the world, and alter the direction of American foreign policy in ways that can change the world. Theoretically, Congress could take action to restrain the President in this arena. Historically, they have proven exceedingly reluctant to do so. By default, then, the Presidency’s vast discretion over the way American interacts with the rest of the world means that he’ll never be entirely irrelevant.
Domestically, the President is more constrained because nothing can become law without Congressional acquiescence. At the same time, though, Congress has been very helpful to the Executive Branch by granting significant discretion to a myriad of regulatory agencies and cabinet departments charged with implementing the laws that it has passed. Congressional oversight of these agencies exists, but it’s typically lax, and a President who really wants to effect public policy with minimal effort can do so through the rule-making process. On top of that, you’ve got the Presidential veto, which virtually ensures that nothing can become law unless the President agrees to it. Given that Congress has successfully overridden a Presidential veto only 109 times in the history of the Republic (with 2,560 vetoes through 2010, that’s an override rate of 4.28%), the odds suggest that a veto would be successful. That alone makes a President vitally relevant to the legislative process, as long as Congress believes they’d follow through on a veto threat.
So, no, a President can never really be entirely irrelevant.
However,a President can make themselves seem irrelevant by failing to exercise the powers granted to them, of course, or by failing to stand up to an assertive Congress. Is this Obama’s problem? To some degree it is, but it’s not something that he’s going to be able to fix very easily. From the time he came into the White House, President Obama has chosen to “lead from behind,” or perhaps not lead at all, when it comes to his domestic policy agenda. The 2009 stimulus was put in the hands of the newly emboldened Democratic Congress, which is why it ended up looking more like a payoff to long time party friends than a package that had any hope of stimulating the economy. While the White House was involved behind the scenes during the health care debate, the President largely let Congress lead the public debate. Perhaps the White House thought that such a strategy would deflect the public criticism over the plan toward Congress rather than the White House,but if that was the strategy it has failed miserably. Now, faced with an assertive Republican majority in the House and an active Republican minority in the Senate, the President finds himself largely unable to do much else other than make speeches about plans that will never be implemented.
Irrelevant? Perhaps not. Weak, indecisive, and floundering? Absolutely. And that’s the recipe for a pretty bad re-election year.
