Description: 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.Brief description: John A. Dearborn is assistant professor of political science and the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Dean's Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University. He is coauthor of Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and the Unitary Executive.
Review Quotes: "In Power Shifts, John Dearborn provides a very insightful, persuasive, and engaging account of some of the most important congressional activity of the 20th century-namely, legislative efforts to expand or rein in presidential authority and capacity in key policy areas. . . . Through a well-developed argument and an excellent qualitative research design, Dearborn shows that these institutional changes were shaped by prevailing ideas about presidential and congressional decision-making. . . . Dearborn marshals a remarkable array of evidence, including hundreds of contemporaneous statements by members of Congress and opinion leaders, to show convincingly that ideas have shaped the development of the institutional presidency and the power of the two branches."-- "Congress & the Presidency"