The Right Should Re-Rethink Presidential Power

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Cato Institute :

 

 

 

 

The Right Should Re-Rethink Presidential Power

 

 

by Gene Healy

 

Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and author of Cult of the Presidency.

 

Added to cato.org on November 13, 2012

 

This article appeared in The DC Examiner on November 13, 2012.

 

With conservatives still smarting from Mitt Romney's 126-vote drubbing in the Electoral College, now is the hour for "rethinking" on the Right. I'm no Nate Silver, but I'll hazard a prediction on one result of the ongoing ideological introspection: The conservative movement is finally going to rediscover a healthy skepticism toward presidential power.

 

Last week, in "Restoring Constitutional Checks on the Executive," a post on her Washington Post "Right Turn" blog, Jennifer Rubin gestured in that direction: "When Republicans were in the White House more often than Democrats, they became more than a little expedient when it came to separation of powers. It is time to return to conventional checks and balances."

 

Such a return would, in a way, be "coming home" for the Right.

 

Hard as it may have been to remember during the George W. Bush era, conservatives were the original opponents of the Imperial Presidency. After FDR's 12-year reign, conservatives in Congress championed the 22nd Amendment, limiting presidential terms. Most of the intellectuals who coalesced around William F. Buckley's National Review in 1955 were executive-power skeptics who associated powerful presidents with activist liberalism. In 1964, Barry Goldwater denounced "the current worship of powerful executives" as "a philosophy totally at war with that of the Founding Fathers."