The President and Congress
To the framers of the national Constitution, some of the press statements of to-day regarding existing relations between Congress and the chief executive would make strange reading. For example, head-lines in the Washington Times of May 16 state that the President's hands are tied in Congress by the loss of his allies; and the question is asked, “How is President Roosevelt to accomplish results in legislation, now that he has broken with the Democrats?” It is further stated that “the President has been in need of the Democrats to get results on more questions than rate regulation. He could not have passed the Philippine tariff bill through the House but for the Democratic votes,” etc. From these and many like statements that might be quoted one would suppose that he would find prominently set forth in the Constitution that it is the duty of the president to frame legislative measures and secure their enactment into laws by Congress. Yet if with this supposition in mind he should read the Constitution, he would find from beginning to end no suggestion of any such thing, but on the contrary, would learn that the executive and legislative branches of the government are co-ordinate, neither having any control over the other; and that the chief executive is not therefore authorized to concern himself at all with what Congress may do in the matter of legislation. Congress is elected to have entire charge of the making of laws, and the executive department exists to see that the legislation enacted by Congress is carried into effect. The president is simply the head of the executive branch of the government. But so far has the nation lapsed, in practise, from the ideal of republican government embodied in the Constitution, that to-day no other man has so much to do with the legislation of the government as the president, who does not belong to the legislative branch at all. An observer of events at the seat of the government might be excused for raising the question whether Congress is needed at all, if its chief concern is to enact administration measures, somewhat amended perhaps, into laws. If the president is to initiate legislation by presenting the chief measures to come before Congress, and is to exercise a controlling and guiding influence over the deliberations of the legislative body, so that the action taken is mainly such as he suggests, why not authorize him to make the laws himself as well as execute them? That would be a vastly cheaper way of running the government, and the ends arrived at would be substantially the same. If such a question would not be entirely pertinent to-day, it will be so at no distant date in the future if the tendency to combine in the president both the executive and the legislative functions of the government continues. The tendency is directly away from republican government, and in the direction of one-man power.