Peri E. Arnold

Determinism and Contingency in Skowronek's Political Time

Stephen Skowroneks The Politics Presidents Make takes the whole of the historical presidency as the proper concern of political science. To understand the modern presidency, Skowronek explains, we must understand the way it parallels, as well as differs from, the historical presidency. His formulation of recurring roles within successive presidential leadership regimes reveals the logic of that parallel. The result is a learned and powerful book that offers a new framework for understanding presidential politics and uses it to illuminate representative presidents in the course of American political history. Skowroneks model of recurrent cycles implies a deterministic reading of presidential leadership. Recurring cycles of leadership duplicate each other and contain the same sequence of leadership roles. The implication is that incumbents are captives of the force of the cycle and leadership is a product of the cycles roles. In these comments, I shall briefly characterize Skowroneks argument and then take issue with some deterministic aspects of it.

Effecting a Progressive Presidency: Roosevelt, Taft, and the Pursuit of Strategic Resources

While attracting ardent interest from social scientists on a number of fronts, the Progressive Era is insufficiently examined within presidential studies. Scholars have, instead, portrayed Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as prefiguring a later, modern presidency. For example, Sidney Milkis writes that the emergence of the modern presidency began in the Progressive Era, “especially as shaped by the statesmanship of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.” Sidney Milkis, The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System Since the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 8. William Leuchtenburg observes that Franklin Roosevelt contributed to the modern presidency by giving the office “an importance which went well beyond what even Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had done.” William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), 327. However, scholarship has not explained fully why these two Progressive Era presidents were precociously “modern.”

Executive Reorganization & the Origins of the Managerial Presidency

The author explores the efforts of various executive reorganization plans in this century, especially those predating the Brownlow Committee of 1936-37, to deal with the issue of augmenting the managerial capacity of the presidency. He examines the relationship between apolitical organization theory and the growth of presidential power. The primary function of the several executive reorganization schemes, the author suggests, is to reduce and mask conflict over the changing relationship of the president to Congress and to administration. Reorganization led to a more expansive presidency claiming growing powers over the administrative state.

Imperial from the Beginning: The Constitution of the Original Executive: Prakash, Saikrishna Bangalore. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. 464 pages.

Modern presidents are often accused of constitutional overreach. These charges may relate to constitutional responsibilities of appointment, war and foreign affairs, spending, the “take care” clause, and not least, the mandate to protect the Constitution itself. When constitutional questions become political debates, partisans will support their claims with constitutional scholarship. Nowhere is that impulse clearer than in debates over the Constitution’s war powers. For the past 65 years, presidents have claimed power over war and peace as their own. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. argued in his 1973 work The Imperial Presidency that presidents had subverted the Constitution’s “declare war” provision. Since the 1970s, legal scholars and political scientists have produced important scholarship for and against presidential war power. We can find similar institutional partisanship in scholarly debates about the “unitary presidency” and other dimensions of the office. In a time of such engaged scholarship, Saikrishna Prakash’s Imperial from the Beginning is notable for its cool neutrality. Rather than taking sides about heated matters such as war, “unitarianism,” executive orders, etc., Professor Prakash’s work is a corrective to all of these battles and their contestants. He observes that we are “bedeviled by erroneous concepts of the original presidency” (3). Critics of modern presidential activism underestimate the Constitution’s investment in executive capacity. However, proponents of presidential power also have it wrong, defending actions “contrary to the original Constitution” (3). Professor Prakash’s premise is that no theory of presidential power can be taken seriously unless it begins with the original Constitution’s understanding of executive structure and power, or what he calls “the original executive.” To that end, Prakash, a Yale law professor, conducts a kind of constitutional archeology, digging through layers of meaning and precedent to locate the most accurate description of the Constitution’s executive structure and powers, and then considering them as they were understood in the framing period and during the early Republic. Professor Prakash’s method is textual and contextual. A simple textualism can be bent to support a partisan reading of the Constitution, but Professor Prakash’s textualism is subtle, open-ended and curious. He ranges

45.00 (hardcover).

John Rohr’s work made the Constitution central to American administration. He created a normative conception of administrative constitutionalism, and through textual interpretation he argued the framers’ ideas of administration are consistent with modern administration. I interrogate Rohr’s interpretations to argue that he overstated the compatibility of the framers’ vision and modern administration. Thus, I argue, to support Rohr’s normative program we must turn away from Rohr’s static Constitution and, instead, engage theories of constitutional change.