Gene Healy is the author of The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power, and he is a Cato Institute vice president and a former columnist for the Washington Examiner. His 2008 book renewed a long-running debate about the increased powers and growing public expectations of the presidency, a debate that has only increased since its publication in the waning months of former President George W. Bush's administration. Bush's successors, former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, and now President Joe Biden, have, to varying degrees and in their own ways, only further concentrated executive power.
"The Founding Fathers intended a more modest role for the president: to defend the country when attacked, to enforce the law, to uphold the Constitution — and that was about it," the Economist’s Lexington columnist wrote when the book was published. "But over time, the office has grown."
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In a mid-October email conversation with the Washington Examiner, Healy discussed that growth, both in the long run of American history and in the administrations of Biden and Trump. This is a lightly edited transcript of that conversation.
Washington Examiner: What is the cult of the presidency, and why did you write a book about it?
Healy: It's shorthand for a widespread American tendency to invest a limited, constitutional office with messianic, quasi-mystical aspirations. The original brief, faithful execution of the laws was challenging enough, but the modern president is now responsible for all things great and small: the state of the national soul, the price of a tank of gas, and freedom all around the world. Our political culture has invested the office with preposterously vast responsibilities. As a result, the president wields powers that no one fallible human being ought to have.
Washington Examiner: Has the situation gotten better or worse since you wrote the book?
Healy: I guess I wasn't convincing enough because, in the years since I finished the book, the "most powerful office in the world" has only grown more powerful. George W. Bush implemented a host of secret dragnet surveillance programs and, in his last month in office, unilaterally ordered a multibillion-dollar auto bailout just days after Congress voted the move down. Obama, who had pledged to "turn the page on the imperial presidency," launched two undeclared wars — in Libya and against ISIS — and defied the limits imposed by the 1973 War Powers Resolution on the novel theory that you're not engaged in "hostilities" if the foreigners you're bombing can't hit you back. Donald Trump added new weapons to the presidential arsenal, like the ability to use national emergency declarations to do an end-run around Congress in a budget battle or order up drone strikes on senior government figures of countries we're not legally at war with.
Washington Examiner: But didn’t Trump’s antics knock the presidency down a peg?
Healy: Well, you could say that Trump did an "amazing job" puncturing the romance of the presidency and making it hard to take presidents seriously as moral leaders. When we fill the office, we're not sending our best. One thing he didn't do, however, is leave the presidency any less powerful or dangerous than he found it. Four years of liberal caterwauling about the imminent descent of fascism didn't lead to any sustained effort to "tyrant-proof" the presidency by relimiting its powers. We're going to regret that missed opportunity.
Washington Examiner: You wrote recently, “Biden has repeatedly engaged the full powers of the presidency in an attempt to impose a forced settlement on issues where the American people are deeply divided.” Is this the cult in action?
Healy: It's a reflection of the fact that the modern president has increasingly become our "culture warrior in chief," hellbent on making a federal case out of every divisive social issue, dividing us further in the process.
Take the debate over "trans rights": We don't need national rules about bathroom access determined by which political party seizes the presidency. Yet Joe Biden's latest Title IX edict makes him commander in chief of the girls' room. He wants to settle the debate over sex-change treatment for minors with the stroke of a pen, and he's just appointed a federal czar of the grammar-school library to harass local school districts that don't want Gender Queer on the bookmobile.
If everything from what books go on school library shelves to who gets to use the girls' locker room becomes a matter of presidential policy, good luck convincing people to put an electoral loss in perspective. It fosters the dangerous sentiment that every election is a “Flight 93 Election”: Charge the cockpit, do or die. Is that really what we want to encourage? We ought to be moving in the opposite direction: lowering the stakes of presidential elections by limiting the damage any particular president can do.
Washington Examiner: What powers did the king of England have at the time of the Revolutionary War that the modern president does not have?
Healy: Very few. In Federalist 69, Hamilton runs through a list of kingly powers the president wasn’t supposed to have. For instance, the king can create offices and agencies; he’s the “arbiter of commerce” within the realm. The president has no such powers. The king can start wars; the president can’t. Sure, the president is “commander in chief,” but as Hamilton explains, that just means he’s the “first general and admiral” of U.S. military forces — and generals and admirals don’t get to decide whether and when we go to war. The king is head of the national church; the president has “no particle of spiritual jurisdiction.”
Flash-forward to the late 20th century, by which time presidents had “unilaterally created over half of all administrative agencies in the United States,” enjoyed the power to launch wars at will, and, like Joe Biden, consider themselves entrusted with the care and feeding of “America’s soul.”
Washington Examiner: Did the Constitution’s framers err when they made the head of government and head of state the same officeholder?
Healy: Probably. The legal scholar F.H. Buckley made a compelling case for that view in his book The Once and Future King. In parliamentary systems, where those roles are separated, the head of government isn’t exalted as the living symbol of nationhood: They shout at him during “Question Time.” All of that, Buckley says, helps explain why there’s no comparable “Cult of the Prime Minister” across the pond. Maybe we should swallow our republican pride and hand off the head-of-state role to, say, the Kardashians.
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Washington Examiner: Is impeachment — of Trump, Biden, anyone! — part of the solution?
Healy: Going into the Trump presidency, my longtime view on impeachment was: We don’t impeach presidents enough. Given all the crooks and clowns we’d been saddled with over 230 years of constitutional history, it was kind of pathetic we’d only made three serious attempts at removal. Even when the Senate failed to convict, as in the Johnson and Clinton cases, impeachment served a disciplinary function by leaving a black mark on their legacies.
That said, the Trump experience has made me somewhat less exuberant about impeachment’s upside. Congress wheeled the cannon into place twice in the space of two years, and out popped a little cartoon flag reading “bang.” If a president can be impeached twice and go on to win the nomination of his party, as Trump is poised to do, it’s pretty clear conditions of mass partisanship have rendered the remedy ineffectual. If we want to check presidential abuse of power, we’d do better off focusing on the office, not the man, and directly reducing those powers that are ripe for abuse.