Power Shifts: Congress and Presidential Representation

That the president uniquely represents the national interest is a political truism, yet this idea has been transformational, shaping the efforts of Congress to remake the presidency and testing the adaptability of American constitutional government.

The emergence of the modern presidency in the first half of the twentieth century transformed the American government. But surprisingly, presidents were not the primary driving force of this change--Congress was. Through a series of statutes, lawmakers endorsed presidential leadership in the legislative process and augmented the chief executive's organizational capacities.

But why did Congress grant presidents this power? In Power Shifts, John A. Dearborn shows that legislators acted on the idea that the president was the best representative of the national interest. Congress subordinated its own claims to stand as the nation's primary representative institution and designed reforms that assumed the president was the superior steward of all the people. In the process, Congress recast the nation's chief executive as its chief representative.

As Dearborn demonstrates, the full extent to which Congress's reforms rested on the idea of presidential representation was revealed when that notion's validity was thrown into doubt. In the 1970s, Congress sought to restore its place in a rebalanced system, but legislators also found that their earlier success at institutional reinvention constrained their efforts to reclaim authority. Chronicling the evolving relationship between the presidency and Congress across a range of policy areas, Power Shifts exposes a fundamental dilemma in an otherwise proud tradition of constitutional adaptation.

Author: John A. Dearborn
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 09/27/2021
Pages: 368
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.40lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.81d
ISBN: 9780226797663

About the Author
John A. Dearborn is a postdoctoral associate and lecturer at Yale University, holding appointments in the Center for the Study of Representative Institutions at the MacMillan Center, the Policy Lab at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, and the Department of Political Science. He is the coauthor of Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and the Unitary Executive.