PERTURBED PRESIDENTIAL POLICIES PART II

As you may have gathered from last week’s post, I’m currently in the midst of a long struggle, torn between my natural tendency to look to my president for great “change” and my desire to hope for a renewed sense of the authority that the Constitution ought to hold in how we are governed. The ever-looming question remains, though, what are we to do in times of great economic, social, or political struggles? This is why I’d like to branch out from our case-study of Andrew Jackson and consider instead the moral dilemmas that were faced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his decisions to deviate from the Constitution.

The presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt came much later, and at a very different point of political and national turbulence than that of Andrew Jackson. FDR entered during a time of national desperation. Unemployment was reaching record highs and continuously increasing, farm prices were falling dramatically, bank runs were costing the American public billions of dollars. (SOURCE).

In FDR’s first Inaugural Address, he claims his anticipation of departing from the “normal balance” between executive and legislative authority in an effort to meet the tasks before the country. In the event of Congress not abiding to such measures, FDR stated, “I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe”. SOURCE) The American public believed themselves to be facing a foe just as threatening as a foreign enemy, and the popular consensus was waiting on the President to act in their favor.

As imaginable, FDR took office in 1932 with great support from the voters. After such a successful election, members of Congress were unprecedentedly eager to work with Roosevelt in order to secure prospects for reelection. Roosevelt strategically utilizes this political clout by almost immediately calling Congress into a special session, to draft what historians refer to as “the Hundred Days Policies” (or the beginning of the New Deal). (SOURCE see pg.5). During these first hundred days in office, Roosevelt was able to pass major Banking and Economic Acts, with little to no hesitation from Congress. Several years later, Congress had to pass more legislation in order to ensure the President had adequate resources to follow through with the Hundred Days Policies. Many of which were monumental pieces of legislation, because of their having granted powers to the Presidency in being able to act alone in the allocation of large budgets coming from Federal dollars. The Emergency Relief Appropriation (ERA) of 1935 is one example (SOURCE see pg.5). Altogether, throughout the span of the New Deal Era, there were a countless amount of new programs and agencies developed to address the social and economic woes of the American people. Most of which, we are still living with today, in the form of federal government bureaucracies. The Social Security Act, Farm Security Administration, and the Fair Labor Standards Act might be a few of the pieces of legislation today remembered as having protected the poor, preserved American Agriculture, and defended the laborer from an evil “laissez-faire” capitalistic system.

But have we, as common and current US citizens, cared to step back for a bit to consider the ramifications of this heroic, powerful, and historic presidential figure? Why should I bother critiquing a president we should probably be more concerned with honoring for his courage in carrying a nation through such a hopeless time? I personally think the most interesting part of FDR’s legislative binge-stint was the reorganization that had to come about within the Executive branch. A couple years after the Hundred Days Policies, FDR was also successful in passing the Executive Office of the President (EOP) Act. The EOP consists of immediate staff to the president, called the White House Office, and the Bureau of the Budget: a minor departmental transfer originally housed in the treasury department” (SOURCE see page 8). This act was primarily passed in order to allow the President to formulate and execute policy ideas within the White House. This was a monumental transfer of power from the legislative branch into the House of the Executive, but done so in the name of “waging war against an emergency”. Why then, is this EOP concept unquestioningly inherited by all of Roosevelt’s successors to the Office of the Presidency as well? Even though Roosevelt might have seen the expansion of the presidency as necessarily unconstitutional, but inherently temporary, we are still operating largely under the institutionalization of an inflated Executive, as established during the Great Depression.

What’s my largest problem with the cheapening of the Executive Branch into a short-cut policy-making machine on demand for the American majority? It seems we have only examples in our history of this pattern having tipped the scales of the checks and balances system, which is designed so carefully in order to protect the people from encroaching powers-plays by the government, by helping uphold the authority of the Constitution (an authority that ought to be greater than any person or institution can achieve). In the more extreme case of Andrew Jackson, we were at risk of losing Constitutional accountability governmental figures should have in order to not be able to assume whatever powers they might see fit for their office. But in the more subdued and humanitarian case-study of FDR, we are left with the story of a hero who pulls a country out of a Depression, but leaves the legacy of a contemporary American public more dependent on the growth of the government for their everyday needs (even without the looming “war-like” threat of an economic depression).

The legacy of governmental expansion has never been successfully maintained as “temporary”. And aside from the fact that we don’t have funds to sustain such consistent growth in the long-run, I’m more bothered by thinking we don’t have the human capacity to maintain and grow our creativity to match a government that is already promising to provide for the “common goals” of America. As quoted by Ron Paul, a young historian Alexis DeTocueville, was most impressed while traveling the early United States by the ability of Americans to form voluntary associations in order to achieve common goals. He wrote, “wherever, at the head of some new undertaking, you see the Government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association” (Paul, The Revolution, 75). The reason why it might be difficult for us to start to expect less from the figure-head of our country is because it means we will surely have to expect more from ourselves. Instead of waiting for Obama to create the change in my neighborhood, I would only have myself to look to. As scary or daunting as that might appear, I would rather try my hardest and use whatever creative abilities I have in the process, even with potential failure looming. To not do so, would be to waste the freedoms that I have inherited, limit the responsibility human beings ought to have for fellow human beings, and crush the development and redefinition of the dreams we have as a nation for our nation. Let’s put creating, dreaming, and goal-setting back in the hands of everyday human beings.

-E.C.Soria