 Chapter 4, the presidency. The presidency has become the most powerful office in the U.S. government. Now, this is not exactly the way the founding fathers wanted it to be back in 1787 when they created the Constitution. They envisioned Congress to be the center of the government, even though they wanted all three branches to have relatively equal power and they didn't want any one branch to become too powerful. They always thought that Congress would be the center of the government. And by that, I mean they wanted Congress to really lead the government and take the initiative in passing laws and deciding whether the country would go to war and make other big decisions. That's not how it's transpired over the course of American history because as the size of the nation and the government grew from 1787 to now, so has the power of the presidency. The presidency has become much more powerful today than it was back in the day of George Washington's first presidency. Why is the presidency so powerful? Well, there are three reasons. First of all, we only have one president. Unlike members of Congress who have to work together and cooperate and negotiate and compromise and share power and share the spotlight, we only have one president. The president makes all the decisions by himself. He has all the power to himself. And he has all the spotlight, the media spotlight to himself. And so that's one reason why the president is so powerful. Another reason the president is so powerful is that the president doesn't just have formal powers, meaning the powers that are granted to him because he's president. The president also has informal powers, powers that come not because he's president but because he's such an important person sort of related to the presidency but nowhere in the Constitution do these informal powers or these informal powers stated. And we'll talk more about the formal powers and the informal powers that the president has in a few minutes. Another reason why the president is so powerful is the president also has more media access and exposure than any other politician in the United States. It's much more than any governor, much more than any senator, much more than any member of the House of Representatives. For example, today when President Trump says something or tweets something, it's all over the news. The news will even stop to report on something that the president said. And this is not just Donald Trump but every president before him had the same access to the media and exposure in the media than Donald Trump has and much more than any other politician. So the fact that we only have one president at a time, the fact that presidents have both formal powers and informal powers and the fact that presidents have more media access and exposure than any other politician is what makes the president and the presidency so powerful. Many political experts fear that the presidency has become too powerful. This is what your textbook calls a power problem and if you've been reading the textbook you'll see that in every chapter your textbook authors talk about the power problem within the particular topic that they're discussing. And so the basic idea of the power problem is how do we make sure that the government keeps functioning in a way that the family fathers envisioned it and in the case of the presidency this is clearly not what's happening. The presidency, the president is much more powerful than they envisioned and they wanted him to become. So many political experts today refer to the modern presidency as the imperial presidency meaning that the presidents today and in the past few decades actually have acted less like leaders of a democratic system of government and more like emperors or kings. And so today we talk about the imperial presidency as a presidency that's in a sense gotten out of hand that is much more powerful than the founding fathers envisioned. The presidency is the only nationally elected office in the United States so the president is the only politician, the only elected office that is elected by the entire country at the same time. Senators as we saw in the last lecture only represent their state and so they only have to run in their state. Members of the House of Representatives only represent their congressional district and so only have to run in their congressional district. The president however is elected by the whole country and every voter in the country gets to vote for president every four years. Now to be eligible to serve as president in the United States one must satisfy three requirements. You have to be a natural born citizen. Now most people think that means you have to have been born in the United States in one of the 50 states or in Washington D.C. That's not exactly the case to be considered natural born citizen. You either have to be born in the United States or you have to be born overseas on U.S. territories. So for example in 2008 John McCain ran for president against Barack Obama. John McCain was not born inside the United States. John McCain was born in the Panama Canal zone in Panama when the territory around the Panama Canal was owned and operated by the United States. He was born there because his father was a Navy Admiral, a very famous Navy Admiral. And so his parents were stationed there when John McCain was born. But even though John McCain was born overseas he was still considered a natural born citizen under the Constitution. And so therefore he was eligible to run for president in 2008. In addition to being a natural born citizen you have to be at least 35 years old and that's the oldest age requirement for any office in the United States. For example to be eligible to be a senator you have to be 30 years old. To be elected to serve as a member of the House of Representatives. You only have to be 25 years old and in many cities around the country, many citizens in towns around the country, you only have to be 18 to serve as a mayor. So age qualifications for different offices around the country vary. But the oldest age requirement for any office and this is set under the in the Constitution to be president. You have to be at least 35 years old and you have to have been a resident in the United States for at least 14 years. You have to have lived at least 14 years of your life in the United States before you can run for president, before you can serve as president. And by the way to get back to the natural born citizen part the president is the only office in the United States where one has to be a natural born citizen. You cannot be born in another country and immigrate to the United States becoming a United States citizen and then run for president. You can do that if you want to be a senator or a member of the House of Representatives but you cannot do that to be a president. And the reason for this is that the family fathers did not want any kind of foreign interference in the United States government. They didn't want sort of spy for another country to come here and run for president. They wanted to make sure that all presidents are true Americans, true natural born citizens of the United States. Now even though the voters of the United States vote for president every four years the president is not actually elected by the voters. At least directly the president is elected by something called the Electoral College. So the presidency is what we call an indirectly elected position because the people still have a big say. We vote for the people in the Electoral College who then vote for the president. So we the people vote in November and then one month later in December the Electoral College votes. Now who is this Electoral College? The Electoral College is comprised is made up of 538 people called electors. Each of whom represent their state and Washington DC which is a territory not a state. Why 538 members? Well that number is very closely related to the number of people in the U.S. Congress. Remember from last lecture I said that there are 535 members of Congress. So 535 members of Congress, 538 members of Electoral College. There are 3 more members of Electoral College than there are members of Congress and that's because not only are states represented in the Electoral College. Not only do states, the people living in states get to decide who the president is going to be but also the people who live in Washington DC. So they get 3 members of the Electoral College to represent Washington DC. Now every state has a different number of people who represent them in the Electoral College. And number of people, the number of electors that each state gets is tied to the number of people who live in the state. The more people that live in a state the more electors that it gets so it's tied to population. The bigger the state the more electors. The smaller the state the fewer electors. So every state has at least 3 electors because every state has at least 3 members of Congress. Every state has 2 senators just like every other state and every state has at least 1 member of the House of Representatives. Bigger states have more members of the House of Representatives. So again the bigger the state the more electors the state has. So what happens on election day when we vote when I go to vote in November for president even though I will choose one of the two people running for president or more if there are but let's say it's just Donald Trump and Joe Biden who are running for president. When I choose one of those people one of those candidates I'm not actually voting for them. What I'm doing is I'm voting for a slate of electors a group of electors from New York State who will then go to the Electoral College when it meets in December to vote and they will vote for either Joe Biden or Donald Trump. Now under the law as it's been the members of the Electoral College usually vote for the person that their state voted for. So if a majority of people in New York State voted for Donald Trump in November then the electors will also vote for Donald Trump. That's not necessarily true though they don't have to by law. Although now just last week if you've been watching the news the Supreme Court ruled that states can force electors to vote for the candidate that the state voted for. But even even though that's you know the case now that's pretty much always been that way where we've never had a situation where people who voted for president in a state their electors did not vote for that person. So that's what happens on election day when we vote for president we're actually voting for electors who then go to vote for the president. Now when the 538 electors vote in December this December for president the candidate who gets at least 270 electoral votes will win the presidency. Why 270? Because 270 is the majority of 538. That's the bare majority of electors. So the president wins the electoral college with 270 electoral votes. So let's say for example and the way it works is that so let's say for example that New York State has 33 electors. Okay so New York State has 33 members of the House of the Senate members of Congress and so has 33 electoral votes. Electors meaning electoral votes. In order to win New York State's electoral votes all a candidate needs to do is win a majority of the voters in New York State. So let's say in November Joe Biden wins New York State by 30,000 votes. How many electoral votes does he win from New York? 33 he wins them all. It's what we call the winner-take-all system. So the winner of a state, the winner of the popular vote meaning the vote of the people in a state wins the state's electoral votes completely. All of them no matter how much the candidate won the popular vote by. So again if Joe Biden wins by 30,000 votes he wins all of New York's 33 electoral votes. If Joe Biden wins New York State's popular vote by 5 million he still wins 33 all. If Joe Biden wins by one vote, just one vote he still wins all 33 electoral votes. So it doesn't matter what the margin of the popular vote victory is you win every single electoral vote in the state. So once a candidate wins enough states to total 270 electoral votes he wins. It doesn't matter what the popular vote is because again you can win a state by one vote by 10 votes by 10 million votes. You still win every single one. And then on the converse if you lose a state by only one vote or by 10 million votes it doesn't matter you lose all the states' electoral votes. Because that's the case, because the electoral college is allocated by a winner-take-all system meaning because a candidate in a state wins all that state's electoral votes no matter how many popular votes they win. Because the electoral college is different than the popular vote it's not just counting up all the number of people who voted for one candidate and all the people who voted for the other and deciding who won. Because the electoral college is different than the popular vote it is possible for a candidate to lose a popular vote but win the electoral college vote to become president. And that's happened a few times in American history and that's exactly what happened in our last presidential election when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. In 2016 Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a little over 3 million votes meaning more than 3 million people in the United States voted for Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump but Donald Trump still won the presidency because he won more electoral votes because he won more states and he won more states' electoral votes and he won. And the reason why he was able to do that is again because we have what's called a winner-take-all system where it doesn't matter how many popular votes you win a state by, if you win the state you win all its electoral votes. And so we can get a better idea of exactly how that happened by looking at this 2016 electoral college map which shows exactly how the electoral college vote was distributed to both candidates. Donald Trump here, the Republican and red, Hillary Clinton, the Democrat in blue. So all the blue states were won by Hillary Clinton, all the red states were won by Donald Trump. So Donald Trump won 325 electoral votes and Hillary Clinton won 213 because Donald Trump won more than 270 electoral votes. He became president even though he lost the electoral college. If you just count up all the people who voted, more people voted for Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump but it doesn't matter because we don't decide the presidency by who won the popular vote meaning who won more people. It's who won more electoral votes and as a product of that more states. And you see here Donald Trump won more states. So to look at this even more deeply, we can use a couple of examples of states to show, to see how it is that Donald Trump was able to win more states and more electoral votes even though he lost the popular vote across the nation. So let's take for example California, the biggest state in the country which has 55 electoral votes and that's because California is the most populated state in the country. California has 55 electoral votes. So in California in 2016 almost 14 million people voted in the presidential election. So that's quite a lot, almost 14 million people. 8.75 million voted for Hillary Clinton. 4.49 million voted for Donald Trump. So Hillary Clinton won California by a huge margin, about 4.25 million people. About 4.25 million more people in California voted for Hillary Clinton to become president than for Donald Trump to become president. And that's a huge margin and as a result because more people voted for Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton won all 55 of California's electoral votes. Now let's look at Wisconsin here. Wisconsin has 10 electoral votes, Donald Trump won Wisconsin. He won Wisconsin by less than 25,000 votes. It was incredibly close. He only won Wisconsin by 25,000 so compare that. Hillary Clinton won California by 4.25 million and Donald Trump won Wisconsin by only 25,000. It was very close but even though it was close, even though almost as many people in Wisconsin voted for Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump still won all 10 of Wisconsin electoral votes because he won more votes. Because we have a winner-take-all system. In Michigan, another state with 16 electoral votes. Trump won Michigan by less than a thousand votes so incredibly close. About as close as you can get given how many people live in the state of Michigan. And again, even though Hillary Clinton almost won it, she got none of the electoral votes because Donald Trump won the whole thing and we have a winner-take-all system. So Trump won 16 there. Pennsylvania, another big state with 20 electoral votes. Trump won Pennsylvania by less than 50,000 votes. So again, another incredibly close election in Pennsylvania. But again, because we have a winner-take-all system, doesn't matter if Trump won Pennsylvania by 50,000 votes or 50 million votes or one vote. He won all the Pennsylvania votes because he won Pennsylvania's popular vote. So if you combine Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, Trump won 111 electoral votes with just about a 200,000 vote margin over Hillary Clinton. Meaning that in the state of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania put together only about between those three states, only about 200,000 more people voted for Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton. And yet Donald Trump won all 111 of the votes in those states. So that's how Trump won. So Trump won a small margin of a lot of these states that were very close like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, even Texas. Where Hillary Clinton won, she won big. She won by millions of voters in California, millions of voters in New York, and even though she won those states by millions, she still wasn't able to come up with enough electoral votes to reach 270. And Donald Trump did. So that's why you can win the electoral college but lose the popular vote. That's what can happen. Another time this happened was in 2000 when George W. Bush ran against Al Gore. And in that election, it was even closer. By election night, by the end of election night, every state in the country had been decided except for Florida because Florida was so close and it ended up coming to just a few hundred votes. And in fact, it was so close that it was not even decided by election night. But it was so close in the electoral college that whoever won Florida won the presidency. Now, when the popular vote was totaled, Al Gore was leading George Bush by more votes, the popular vote, than Florida has votes total. So it would be like, let's say Florida has a hundred thousand votes. Al Gore was already leading George Bush by more than a hundred thousand votes. So if it was just up to the popular vote, Florida would not have mattered. Al Gore would have been announced as president on election night. But because we have the electoral college and because nobody was at 270 yet, and Florida would put either one of the two candidates above 270, we had to wait until after election day and then the courts got involved. So it wasn't until December, actually, close to Christmas time, that Florida was decided for George Bush and George Bush was made president in the United States. So the electoral college is what elects the president, not the popular vote. And because of that, and because of the way we have this winter take-all system, where in order to win electoral votes, all you need to do is win that state's popular vote by at least one vote, that is why a situation like this can happen where Donald Trump loses the popular vote but wins the electoral college and thus becomes president. Okay, so why do we elect the president this way? It's not exactly democratic, right? If we wanted to have a truly democratic presidential election system, we would do it the way we elect senators, members of the House of Representatives, Congress and the rest, governors and the rest. We would just say, okay, whoever wins the popular vote wins. The reason we have this system, the reason we have the electoral college is a result of a compromise between northern and southern states. Just like many other compromises that led to the formation of the Constitution we have, there was a disagreement between the states, particularly northern and southern states, over how to elect the president. Some states, particularly northern states, wanted to have a straight election, whoever gets the most votes wins. Southern states didn't like that because in 1787, when the founding fathers wrote the Constitution in Philadelphia that summer, more white men, the kind of people who would be voters, lived in the north. So the northern states had more voters. And so the southern states worried that if we elected the president simply by a straight popper vote, then northern states would be able to elect the president and southern states would never be able to elect somebody that they wanted as president. And that was a particular worry to southern states because of the issue of slavery. The southern states were worried that sometime in the future, a northern president and a northern congress, a northern-dominated congress would try to end slavery. And so southern states sort of forced the northern states to accept the compromise, where we don't elect the presidency by a straight popper vote, but that we elected through the electoral college system where the electors would be distributed to different states according to their population, according to the number of representatives they had, and remember because of three-fifths compromise, slaves who would not be eligible to vote for president, obviously because they were slaves, would still contribute to the number of representatives in the house that every southern state would have because slaves would be counted three-fifths of person for the purpose of deciding how many representatives the state would have. So by having an electoral college system, even though the northern states still had more voters, southern states would be able to close the gap between the number of voters in the north and the number of voters in the south. So essentially the creation of the electoral college system because it was based on a thesis compromise and that compromise, southern states ended up getting 13 more electoral votes than they would have had if slaves were not selected. And so northern states still had more electoral votes, but the advantage that the north had over the south in the presidential election system was cut down considerably because of the electoral college. So the northern states still had the advantage, but not as big an advantage as they would have if you had a popular vote system of letting everybody just vote rather than the electoral college system that they created. And that sort of worked because the first few presidents in the United States were all from the south and particularly all from Virginia, which was the biggest state in the country at the time. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, some of those first presidents were all from the south, all mostly from Virginia. The only exception really was the second president in the United States. John Adams, who was the first vice president in the United States, he was from Massachusetts, but most of the other first few presidents were all southerners. So today there's a big debate over whether to keep the electoral college. Some people like the idea of the electoral college, but many people do not like it. And so there's a debate going on between those who want to keep it and those who want to get rid of it. In fact, one of the response papers you have to write this semester, one of the two, has to do with an essay that I gave you to read, an article that I gave you to read about the debate over whether or not to keep the electoral college. Okay, so let's move to talk about what exactly the president does, what exactly his role is, what his powers are. The president basically is head of the executive branch. Okay, so the executive branch is one of the three branches of the federal government. We've got the executive branch, we've got the judicial branch and the legislative branch. Well, the president is the head of the executive branch. The president oversees the federal government's executive departments, meaning what are those? Those are the State Department, the Defense Department, etc. These comprise the government's bureaucracy. These are the agencies of government that implement the laws that are passed by Congress that actually do the day-to-day work of government. The president also oversees the White House executive office. The advisors inside the White House who work closely with the president day-to-day to make policy to run the White House and give the president advice. The National Security Council, which gives the president advice about issues of national security, issues of military affairs, war and peace. And the Council of Economic Advisers, which advises the president on issues of economic policy, the U.S. economy. So the president supervises both. He's the boss of both the federal government's executive departments and the White House's executive office. Presidents have different sources of power. One of these sources of power is what we call enumerated powers. Enumerated powers are enumerated right in the Constitution. What do you mean by that? They're actually written to enumerate means to spell out. These are powers directly stated in Article 2 of the Constitution. Article 2 of the Constitution is part of the Constitution that describes the presidency, the executive branch of government. So two examples of enumerated powers that the president has in the Constitution, where you can actually look and see in writing that the Constitution says that this is a power of the president, the power to make treaties, and the power to hire people. So we talked about treaties in the last lecture, how the president has the power to negotiate and sign treaties, agreements with foreign countries, and then the senate has the power to confirm those treaties and vote those treaties into law. The power to make treaties is a power that's directly discussed in the Constitution. And also the power to hire people. So the people who work in the White House is advisors. The president says gets to hire his own advisor. So the president has the ability to hire people. So the power to make treaties, the power to hire people are what we call enumerated powers. Implied powers are not enumerated in the Constitution or not exactly written down, but it's understood that the president should have these powers because it's logical to think that the president has these powers because the president has these enumerated powers. So, for example, the power to fire people. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that the president can fire people who work for him in the White House. It only says that he has the power to hire people. But the idea is that if the Constitution says that the president has the power to hire people, then it's only logical to conclude that if the president can hire people, then he can also fire them. And so the power to fire people is an example of what we call implied powers. They're not written down, but it's understood by common sense that these are powers that the president has. Inherent powers are powers that presidents claim as inherent in the office, meaning that even though they're not written down, the president has these powers because of the fact that he is the president. They're almost like implied powers. Powers of the president are simply because the president is the president. So, for example, the power to use military force. The Constitution does not say that the president has the power to use military force. In fact, the power to declare war is a power that's given to Congress, is a power that the Constitution gives to Congress. But what the Constitution does say is that the president is commander-in-chief of the military, meaning he's the head of the military. So then it's logical, just like the idea of implied powers, that the power to use military force is inherent in the presidency, meaning that the president has this power simply because of who he is and what powers he has. Because if the president is in charge of the military, then obviously he can order them to use military force. And we should also conclude that because the president's job is to protect us as the head of the executive branch, then he should have the power to use the military, if, for example, we're attacked, rather than waiting for Congress to step in and act, that the president should have the power to act right away like George Bush did on 9-11, for example, without waiting for Congress. So implied powers and inherent powers are almost the same, but a little bit different. And then statutory powers are powers that are delegated to presidents by congressional statute, meaning that these are powers that are given to the president because Congress decided to give the president this power by passing a law. So, for example, let's go back to 9-11 as an example. In 2002, just a few months after 9-11, Congress passed a law called the Authorizations for the Use of Military Force in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2002. And that was congressional permission for the president to launch a war in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda, the terrorist group that committed the 9-11 attacks. So, as I said before, the power to declare war is not a power that the president has, it's a power that the Congress has. And so Congress, by passing the Authorization for the Use of Military Force in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2002, was basically giving the president permission to go to war against Afghanistan even though they didn't call it a war, they authorized the Use of Military Force to the president. So, presidents have those formal powers, and I'll go back for a second just to... Inevitable powers, implied powers, inherent powers, statutory powers. Presidents also have informal powers. This is power that they don't have as president. It doesn't come from the Constitution, but it comes simply because of the fact that the president, the position of president is so respected and so powerful. The president, for example, is the leader of his political party, so Donald Trump today, he's a Republican. And because he's president, he's the head of the Republican Party. So the Republican Party looks to him to lead them. He decides what principles and what policies and what decisions the Republican Party is going to push for. And that's because... Not because the Constitution says that he's the head of the political party. There's no law, no Constitution that says this, but it's simply because the president, as powerful as he is as a person, has the ability to control the Republican Party. And we've seen that, particularly over the course of Donald Trump's presidency. At the beginning of his presidency, there were many Republicans in Congress who did not agree with his policies and who actually spoke out publicly in opposition to him. Most of those Republicans are gone, meaning they've lost reelection. Why did they lose reelection? Because when they went for reelection, Donald Trump told his supporters not to vote for them because they didn't support him. And so when other Republicans saw this, saw the power that Trump has as the head of the Republican Party, the ability to tell voters what to do and have them listen, they fell in line and now you don't see many Republicans at all publicly opposing the president because the president has such a firm grip as such total control over his party as the leader of his political party. That's an example of Donald Trump using his informal power to control his political party, the Republican Party. Presidents have to be good at projecting an image and the way that they do this can give them a lot of informal power. Presidents have to cultivate public opinion and know how to engage with the media. Donald Trump is very good at this, especially because of the way he uses Twitter. His supporters love him because he is so direct and so forceful and tough when he engages with the media and when he goes on Twitter and tweets. And so he's good at projecting an image among his own supporters, not so much with the rest of the country, which is why right now he's losing in the polls to Joe Biden. But if you look at his own Republican Party, over 90% of the Republican Party support him. Democrats and independents don't support him and that's why he may lose the presidency if Donald Trump is to win the presidency. One thing he's going to have to do better at is projecting an image of having control over the two main crises that are going on in the country right now, the coronavirus and the aftermath of the George Floyd killing and the Black Lives Matter protests. So that's a quick discussion of the presidency. I hope you got something out of it.