Trump, Clinton, and Executive Power

[Draggingtree]

Cato Institute :

Trump, Clinton, and Executive Power

By Michael D. Tanner

This article appeared on National Review (Online) on July 27, 2016.

 

If there was one single sentence in Donald Trump’s acceptance speech last week that summed up his entire campaign, it was this: “I alone can fix it.” Trump’s ideology may be amorphous, but he firmly believes in the “big man” school of politics. Like Putin, Erdogan, or the late Hugo Chávez, Trump sees himself as Horatius at the Bridge, the only thing standing between us and the dystopian future of his nightmares.

 

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton eschews “I” in favor of the collective “we,” by which she means the government, by which she means her. Hillary’s book may famously have said, “It takes a village,” but she clearly sees herself as the chief of that village.

 

We’ve come a long way since the founding of the Republic, when the president was seen as “an executive,” who would “take care that the laws are faithfully executed,” not the legislator-in-chief. As James Madison warned in Federalist 47, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”