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I want to finish up just briefly a few things about the chapter on the presidency and the Missouri governor here, so we’ll go ahead and start with that. Do you remember when we finished up on way, way, way back when in ancient history here last time we met, we were talking about the President and also his informal power. A very important power is his level of popularity and his ability to persuade Congress and the people to get his agenda done. Right now in a lot of ways what’s going on with George Bush and Social Security in some respects is a reflection of his ability to persuade members of Congress to do a fundamental change in the way Social Security is gonna be restructured. And whether or not he pulls this off in part will be determined a lot by this informal power operating. Will he be able to persuade the American people as well as Congress to make some very fundamental changes in Social Security. So that’d be a very interesting kind of test case. We also finished talking about — on our last time we met, we were looking at how this affects mid term congressional elections. Do you remember that? Do you have that in your notes? About what happens here with the President’s popularity. How at the very first time when he’s elected he’s very high on the public opinion polls. The very first 100 days is your most important time when you’re first elected to try to get your agenda through. Because over time your popularity goes down and then in part it goes down because of, you know, the fact that some problems are very, very difficult to solve. Some campaign promises are not fulfilled. For a lot of different reasons, your popularity tends to go down over time. Once you’re — if you get to be reelected, your popularity will go up a little bit but
then it’ll keep on sliding down, normally what the historical trend has been, after that period of time. When you’re most popular — you greatest opportunity to operate in this realm of informal powers is probably the first 100 days of your administration. And we also said in part because of that decline in popularity, what happens to mid term congressional elections. So, for example, when the President is elected in 2004, we have mid term congressional elections in 2006. Historical trends suggest what in terms of mid term congressional elections? The President’s party in Congress, will they do as well, better, or worse than they did at the time he was elected? They tend to go down. This actually affects to some degree the President’s party. The President’s party, the party in power in the presidency, tends to lose seats in the mid term congressional elections, in part because of the perceived — the potential negative perceptions on the President not getting his agenda through. Again, some other kinds of promises, campaign promises that are not delivered, tends to lead to the party’s — the President’s power losing seats in the mid term congressional elections. So I think that’s where we stopped in our discussion. Now, that brings us to this and this is somewhat of a nice segue in terms of our discussion of bureaucracy, and we’re gonna come back to that, to bureaucracy, a little later. But I’ve got a point here that says the rise of the presidency, the power of the presidency, corresponded with the rise of bureaucracy. And here’s what I want you to understand. Bureaucracy — when we start talking about bureaucracy, bureaucracy really took off in terms of its scope back around the 1930s with the New Deal by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. A lot of brand new programs including some types of social
been the dominant institution. It really wasn’t until about the 1930s that the presidency became the more dominant institution vis a vis Congress because of the fact that he sits at the head of bureaucracy. So as bureaucracy has gotten more powerful over time, so has the presidency. Especially relative to Congress. So anyway — so that’s the important part I wanted to talk about. Now, that also brings us into this discussion about the institutional presidency. I want to talk a little bit about the different components that make up the institutional presidency and we’ll just talk about this very, very briefly. But we’re talking about not just the President as part of the presidency, but rather the other types of actors that play a role helping to enhance the power of the presidency. One of the first major components is the White House staff. If you’ve ever watched “West Wing,” you know how the White House staff operates. “West Wing” is a very good depiction of the White House staff at work. It has people like — you know, for example, the major presidential advisors, the people who got the President elected. People like, for example, Carl Rove is part of the White House staff. The speech writers, the communication directors, the policy advisors who work in the White House, these are part of the White House staff. This might be what you might consider to be the President’s inner circle of advisors. These are the people who have his ear, who are very close to him, who help advise him in terms of what he does. Again, the White House staff director is another good example of that. Communications directors. Those are some of the people who make up his staff. Now, I had in the notes — not the PowerPoints, but in the notes — a little bit
more extended information about how it’s organized, how Presidents kind of organize their staff. I won’t talk about this too much because of time. But when you become President, you’ve got all these advisors. Let’s say right now that I’m President and you’re all my advisors. You’re specialists in different areas. There’s a real question about how we’re all gonna work together to enhance our administration, the power of our administration, in terms of being able to get stuff down. And there are two basic competing models of organization as to how you should be organized. Basically, one is called the pyramid method versus what I consider the wheel or circular method. So we draw a pyramid here and we draw a wheel, and these are basically just again two different ways in which we can organize the staff of people. Very simply put, the pyramid method is like your traditional organizational hierarchy. And so my Chief of Staff, Scott McClellan, would be one of my closest advisors. And if you as one of my also closest advisors have any kind of questions or issues that you needed to confer with me on, you would go through the Chief of Staff in order to confer with me. Again, that has its advantages and disadvantages. It gives the Chief of Staff a lot of power to decide whom I shall be speaking with. And again, he or she can look at all of my priorities to help sort of filter out — you know, prioritize my time to help make me more effective. The problem with this is that there might be some important issues that don’t reach my ears timely enough because it was not viewed as being important in the eyes of the Chief of Staff. The wheel method — and, by the way, Ronald Reagan relied upon this and some presidents have actually used a hybrid of the two. Just to give another brief one
started out this way and he kind of moved back and forth between these two different models. But just again, if you look at the “West Wing” and look at the operations there, it kind of gives you a sense about how even the character there tends to rely pretty heavily on this method right here, on the pyramid method. Yeah, question? [Inaudible student response] Yeah, Reagan and Bush Sr. did more of that. [Inaudible student response] Oh, I see. I see what you’re saying. Does it tend — no, not necessarily at all. To some degree you might suggest that. Here’s what I would say to that. It’s a good question. Does this tend to correspond more with one party versus the other party? Not necessarily, but it leads — on paper sometimes you see it that way. And the reason why is because when you think about Republicans, they think about the efficiency, the business model of efficiency. Traditional corporate hierarchy. That’s first and foremost in their mind. So a lot of times you may see some of that. Again, oftentimes, though, this begins to create certain disadvantages and the President doesn’t know enough information that he should know about. And so then they kind of move toward adopting more of an openness or some kind of modified hybrid structure like that. The Democrats — again, I can’t say — Carter in a lot of ways was a little bit like this, too, actually. So you do have a point here. Carter and Clinton both approached it from this perspective. Open process, give me all the information, let’s make good decisions. But it didn’t work very well. It was a very inefficient way of getting things done and they had to adopt more of a hybrid between the two. That’s a
good point. But again, that’s something that the President has to think about when they’re elected in terms of how they’re gonna organize their staff to make critical decisions that are correct decisions. And again, there’s some advantages and disadvantages with each way. Now, another component besides the immediate inner circle of the President, there’s also something called the executive office of the President. An executive office of the President, these are the agencies that report directly to the President. I’ve got some examples here. OMB, do you remember that? We talked about it before. OMB is the Office of Management and Budget. We talked about that before. I’m gonna bring it up again right now just briefly here. Because remember we said that the Office of Management and Budget plays a key role in helping the President’s — develop the President’s budget. And I use an analogy like you had with your ACT test. The OMB is to the President as the Congressional Budget Office is to Congress. These are two very important bureaucracies in and of themselves that provide information, economic forecasting, budget information, budget formulation advice to the President as CBO does to the Congress. So the Office of Management and Budget plays a major role. Any kind of regulation that has to — before it becomes a regulation has to go before the Office of Management and Budget. And they get to review this regulation and they want to find out do the costs — are the costs lower than the benefits to society. If the benefits exceed the cost, then they’ll allow the regulation. They want to assess that to see whether or not any new regulation — before any new regulation is issued. So that gives the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, a very powerful
of it in these terms. If you look at the President — I’ll give you another picture here — if you look at the President he’s in the center of power here. You can look at his White House staff as his inner circle. You can look at this next circle as the executive office of the President, some of those offices. And then if we were to draw one more circle, you could probably have the cabinet as the next outer layer of advisors. There are some people in the cabinet who really play a much key role and they’re not so far removed out here. Who is the cabinet? When we say the cabinet, what’re we talking about? These are secretaries. Traditional secretaries that you think of? No. Secretaries of major agencies, right? The Secretary of Commerce. The Secretary of Defense. The Secretary of State. The Secretary of Homeland Security. These are the secretaries of each of the major 15 federal departments. Now, I would certainly not put Donald Rumsfeld or Condeleeza Rice out here in terms of her influence or his influence on the President. There are some cabinet agencies who have much more of the President’s inner ear as opposed to some of these offices. But if you look at, for example, the Secretary of Commerce or the Secretary of Labor or the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, those would easily fit more in terms of influence more on this third layer of concentric circles here. [Inaudible student response] Absolutely. Right. It’s very much a condition — an issue of the problem at hand. But historically, the most powerful agencies are departments of like, for example, Defense and State. And so I would — in fact, some books talk about an inner versus
an outer cabinet and you could consider State and Defense more of an inner cabinet and many of the others as being part of the outer cabinet. Certainly right now with the issues of defense and homeland security, you better believe they’re playing more of that inner cabinet kind of role. But again, these top heads of these departments are — again, play critical roles in helping the President get his agenda through to manage his policies to make sure that what the federal government does is consistent with what the President wants the federal government to do. That’s why they play an important role. Now, I don’t mean to put the Vice President way out in the very farthest part, so I won’t do that in terms of this circle. But the Vice President is also part of the institutional presidency. Now, we know who the Vice President is so I’m not gonna tease you and ask you, “Who’s the Vice President.” We know who the Vice President is. But what I want to ask you is this. Does the Vice President have a lot of power? Yes or no? Ben says yes. Why do you think Vice President Cheney — what makes you think that the Vice President has a lot of power? [Inaudible student response] Yes. Very good. He is constitutionally — that is his only job, constitutionally speaking. The president of the Senate. Does he vote in the Senate? Only if there’s a tie. Is there a tie very often? No. Very few times is there really a tie. So the Vice President constitutionally really doesn’t have much of a role to play. [Inaudible student response] Now, in this case here you can look at Dick Cheney as being definitely one of the
And you’d better believe that if you’re President, you’re not gonna want to have a Vice President kind of doing one upmanship and kind of over extending their influence to your detriment. Presidents have big egos and they don’t want to give their Vice President too much responsibility to make them look more powerful potentially than the President. Now, again, George Bush has given Dick Cheney a lot of responsibilities. By virtue of his personality and his knowledge, he has really taken that office and really shaped it with a lot more influence than most traditional Vice Presidents have done. But by and large, though, they tend to play a very limited role, kind of an advisory role. They may head a task force or a commission. When George H. W. Bush was Vice President to Ronald Reagan, you hardly ever heard of the guy. He headed up a couple of task forces, making the government more efficient, but not a whole lot. And again, because Ronald Reagan did not want to have a Vice President sort of overshadowing what Ronald Reagan did. But anyway, those are the four basic components of the executive office of the President. Now, I want to move in and let’s talk a little bit about — finish up talking about impeaching the President. This is kind of an interesting issue as well in light of recent history. First of all, in terms of impeaching the President, it’s a very serious charge. So the question is when can you impeach the President? Well, you have to go back to the Constitution and look at the language of the Constitution. And the Constitution says that the President can be impeached. This is a way, by the way, of holding the President accountable for his actions. Basically, to be impeached requires the commission on the part of the President — the commission of treason, bribery, or other
high crimes and misdemeanors. So if the President is actually selling spies to another country — selling secret information to another country or to spies of another country, then that would be considered — certainly constitute treason. But the commission of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors is grounds — constitutes grounds for impeachment. The question is, what are other high crimes and misdemeanors? And that’s always been a point of debate. Now, a couple of quick things in terms of the role of the House and the Senate. Only the House can bring impeachment proceedings. They vote. They say, “Shall we bring the charges of impeachment — shall we charge the President with these kinds of wrongdoings and move that he be impeached or move toward impeachment proceedings?” Only the House can decide on that vote. Simple majority. There’ve been only two Presidents in our history that have been impeached. Who are they? Clinton and — Nixon almost got impeached, but before the House voted to bring charges of impeachment, what did he do? “I’m outta here.” That’s right. So he was never formally impeached. Who else was impeached? Andrew Johnson. Andrew Johnson. After he was the Vice President, the Vice President for Abraham Lincoln — from Tennessee. Do you remember Andrew Johnson in a little bit of your history here? I won’t go into a whole lot of historical background here, but Andrew Johnson was Lincoln’s Vice President. When Lincoln was assassinated, Johnson became President. Andrew Johnson. And what happened here was that he was dealing with a very radical Congress.
Senate is the one trying you, not the House. The House says, “We’re gonna let you move to the Senate now and they’re gonna try you for whatever charges are being leveled up against you.” And certainly with Bill Clinton it was about lying under oath in terms of Paula Jones and the Monica Lewinsky scandal so it moved to the Senate there. And if you go to trial, a formal trial by the Senate, who presides over this trial? Think about that. Who should preside over the trial? Why would the Vice President do that? The Vice President is in the back pocket of the President, right? So it’s not the Vice President. Who should it be? Good way of looking at it. Get it out of the Senate altogether. I’ll tell you this. It’s not anyone in the Senate who presides over this trial. Who presides over this very serious trial? The Chief Justice. Good. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court presides over this. So now you’re a President. You’ve been charged with treason, high crimes and other misdemeanors. You’re going before — the House has voted to impeach you. You are now going before the Senate. You’re facing members of your party, members of the other party. They’re asking questions about issues and you’re having to stand and answer these charges as well as your lawyer answering these charges. It’s being presided over by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Once all the evidence has been considered, the Senate will vote on it. This time is it a simple majority? No, it’s not even a simple majority vote. What does it have to be instead? We’re talking about removing the President from office. Two thirds. Two thirds is the magic number in so many different ways. A two thirds majority vote in the Senate is required to remove the President from office.
When Andrew Johnson faced that Senate of radical Republicans bent on reconstruction of the South, he missed getting thrown out of office by one vote. He made it by one — he wasn’t — therefore he was impeached by not thrown out — not removed from office by one vote that saved him. What about Bill Clinton? Going back to your more recent history. Did the Senate vote Bill Clinton out of office? That’s right. Did the Senate get a two thirds majority vote? You have to have two thirds to get removed from office. Did he have a two thirds majority vote? No. Did he even get a simple majority vote? No. He didn’t even muster a simple majority vote. A lot of people say basically what happened to Bill Clinton as — again, for better or for worse, depending upon your own interpretation as in part based upon a private affair. Not so much treason or, you know, to the level of magnitude to that degree. And again, you may have different views about this but — you know, because you could make the argument that he was lying to the American people, he lied to a grand jury about his dealings with sexual harassment charges against Paula Jones. But regardless of your viewpoint here, a lot of people in the Senate said, “This does not constitute high crimes and misdemeanors of the magnitude that the founding fathers envisioned. So therefore, we’re not gonna vote to impeach him.” So a lot of people suggested what happened was this was a good opportunity for the Republicans in the House to embarrass him. You know, to be on record as only one of two Presidents ever impeached was awfully embarrassing. But not really with the intent of removing him from office. [Inaudible student response]
who basically sort of presides over this trial, but it won’t be the Chief Justice making this decision. It will be the two thirds majority of the Senate making that decision. It will not be the Chief Justice saying, “I’m gonna throw this out because certain norms were not adhered to.” The Chief Justice is there to make sure certain procedural norms of due process and other Constitutional guarantees are there and provided to the accused, but it will be the Senate as the jury that votes to impeach — to remove from office or not. [Inaudible student response] Yes. It gives the Supreme Court a role to play. But again, that’s more just in making sure that certain standards of due process and other constitutional guarantees are provided and insured. David? [Inaudible student response] Can the Vice President be impeached? Yes. Right. And the Vice President — these are very good questions here. Basically, how it works, though, in terms of the impeachment. Impeachment by the House is like an indictment, tried formally by the Senate. If they vote to remove you, then you are removed from office. Now, let’s move here — boy. We’ll have our third test on the last day of class here. Last thing here, the Missouri executive. Let me move over here and just kind of briefly talk a little bit about the governor. Now, we’re moving to Missouri, moving away from the President and moving to Missouri. Just a couple of basic briefings I want to talk to you about. You know that we have a governor. Our chief executive of Missouri is the governor. Our current governor is Matt Blunt. Matt Blunt — how many years is
he elected for? Four. How many terms of office can he serve? Two. Two terms of office. Talking about in terms of some basic powers here. The governor has the power to veto bills like the President. If I were to ask you what are some similarities and differences, can the governor veto bills from the Missouri legislature? Yes. In what way is it different? What powers does the Missouri governor have that the U.S. President no longer has? Softball you hit out of the stadium, right? Line item veto, right? The governor unlike the President, the governor does have the power of line item veto. This is a very powerful threat. It is awfully hard in Missouri to override a veto. So once you veto, a line item veto, it’s hard to get that overridden. The line item veto, of course, allows you — the governor to cut out certain types of spending in an appropriations bill. That gives him considerable power. Why would a governor have that power and not necessarily the President? Why should governors be allowed that power? What are states required to do? Balance the budget. This is a very important key power to help the governor balance the budget. The governor in some respects, then, exercises, you might say, legislative powers. Remember when we talked about the line item veto? In a lot of ways, the delegation of legislative authority to the executive? Well, the governor has that type of legislative power by virtue of line item veto. Because when you veto some of the line items, you’re creating new legislation, aren’t you? And so he has that kind of power. He also has certain types of judicial powers. Specifically, can the governor grant a stay of execution? Yes. Can the governor pardon somebody for committing a state
