polisci week 4b part 1

Slide 1 - POLS 1101: The Presidency

Slide 2 - that mean?

Slide 3

Slide 4

Slide 5 - Comparing Executive Authority

Slide 6 - Establishing the Presidency

Slide 7 - Executive Powers

Slide 8 - United States v. Nixon (1974)

Slide 9 - Legislative Powers

Slide 10 - The Veto Process

Slide 11 - Why Use the Pocket Veto?

Slide 12 - Legislative Powers

Slide 13 - This Week’s To - Do List

polisci week 4b part 1

Transcript

All right, what do I need to test? Thank you. I appreciate that. Thanks. All right, well, good news first, I suppose. 12 of our class together, and we only have 16 weeks together, so we need to think about this.

Our time is running out. Right. Also, good news, Friday is fall break, Right. So that means no breakout session on Friday. And all the deadlines normally have on Friday, we're going to move them to Monday.

Right. That includes inquisitive as well as a deadline for those of you who signed up for a paper that would be due on Friday.

Right. So please keep that in mind. Have a little bit more time to complete these assignments.

Now, off to not so great news. There are still some last words on gerrymandering and Congress today, but it's kind of an important subject.

Right. Congress makes policies, and we realize that there is a process called gerrymandering.

What was gerrymandering again? Yeah, absolutely. Right. So here I'm redrawing election district lights to favor a particular party.

Right. That's the entire goal of gerrymandering. And remember, redistricting in and of itself is not the problem.

Redistricting is necessary because you want to account for population changes in your state.

But redistricting becomes gerrymandering when it's done for political gates, when one party is trying to cement their population power in existing election districts.

And both Democrats and Republicans have been guilty of gerrymandering, which is why more and more citizens across the US Are demanding independent bipartisan commissions.

Sometimes it comes down to something as simple as the shape of it.

If the shape seems to be rather odd rather than compact.

Right. You can only tell certain parts of the county or certain parts of the city were included at the expense of others.

That's not really a tell. Right. Or when a county or a city is split up for no other obvious reasons, then that too raises the red flag.

Right? That's normally how you can tell, but that's the irony.

You have to look at the map. You have to know what the map looks like. Otherwise, there's simply no way to assess whether it was, in fact gerrymandering.

And so we talked about two methods of gerrymandering.

What was the first one? Two methods of gerrymandering. Hacking. Very good. Hacking is something that we looked at also at the example of Georgia.

Right. Remember we looked here at the Georgia State Senate map, right.

And we looked here at district number 14, and we realized that many of the black voters in District 14 were basically packed into our district.

District 15. Right. Right here. District 15 and District 12. That is package. Right. Trying to pack as many voters as possible into as few districts as possible.

Right? Now, again, that would guarantee a certain election outcome in some districts in those packed districts, but it would reduce the power of that voting block in the rest of the state.

That is the idea behind patenting. And we also saw this at the example of Atlanta, right, where we had, for example, district number six, right.

Rather mixed in terms of its racial and ethnic composition.

And then post black mannerism, we see that district number six disappears and is being included in district 28, where black people were already the majority that was packing.

What was the other method we have packing? And we have. It is absolutely cracking, right? Cracking. So here I basically split certain groups of voters into as many districts as possible, right?

I'm trying to split open, to crack open their voting power.

And once again, there's an example here where we see that the urban and very liberal center of the county is split into three different districts.

And then in two of those districts, the now liberal minority is attached to a more suburban and more Republican majority.

So the liberals in those districts be outnumbered by the suburban and more Republican majority of those districts.

And remember, we cared about this for various reasons, right?

Think about the numbers I gave you. How many elections in Georgia in 2016 had only one major candidate on the ballot?

Even when the election was an open seat, when there was no incumbent, even then we had a large share of elections with only one major party candidates.

Gerrymandering basically robs voters of choice, right?

If you only have one party on the ballot, it is not really a choice.

There is not really any election. And that is why we care so much about gerrymandering and its downstream effects.

All right, any questions about this, then? Let me just briefly, you know, share a few last words on Congress.

And there's, of course, one thing we have to talk about, and that is polarization.

You've heard me talk a lot about how Americans are polarized.

Polarization started in Congress. Polarization started in Congress. Now, what do I mean when I say polarization? When we talk about polarization, we're talking about political polarization or ideological polarization, meaning an increasing ideological distance between the party's policy preferences based on the congressional votes in Congress, right.

In the House and in the Senate. That is how we define polarization. And Congress definitely is politically polarized.

We have so much scholarship showing us that Democrats and Republicans in Congress are now increasingly distant from each other.

The distance between the two parties is increasing.

Let me show you what that looks like. Here we have our 93rd Congress, that was the Congress in the early 70s.

And as you can see, we have our senators in blue Democrats, and then we have the Republic Republican senators red.

And we do the same thing for the House. Democrats in the House are blue, Republicans in the House are red.

And then here you have the ideology. Remember, partisanship and ideology are not the same.

That is why we have both dimensions in those graphs.

So we're ranging here from most liberal to most conservative.

And then the 0 is that middle ground, that sweet spot for bipartisanship, the moderates.

And what can you tell me about our senate in the 70s?

How would you describe the composition of the Senate if you had to describe the ideology of both parties?

How do they relate to each other in the Senate in the early 70s?

What can you tell me? Are they close? Are they far apart? Yeah. Look at this, right? First of all, what should surprise you? Or maybe not so much because you can't hit like us.

Look at those Republicans on the liberal side. There are center left liberal leaning Republicans and there are conservative center right Democrats.

Wow. So you see as it finally makes sense that we're talking about that partisanship and ideology are not the same because obviously you had Democrats who were conservative, you had Republicans who were liberal.

Right. And it's the very same picture in the House as well.

Right. So that is really showing us large overlap between the two parties.

Democrats and Republicans looked very similar on a lot of policies because again, they were mostly be centered in the middle right.

So this obviously is not polarized, right? This is not yet a polarized Congress because you have this overlap, the significant overlap between the two parties.

But now here is where it gets interesting as we move on to our conquest in the 90s.

Once again we have the Senate on the left and we have the House on the right.

What is different? What has changed in contrast to our Congress from the early 70s?

What happened to the overlap? It is less overlap, less overlap, less common ground between Democrats and Republicans.

Look at this, right, Our liberal Republicans are decreasing in number.

Our conservative Democrats are also decreasing in number.

And we see that there is increasingly a gap between the two parties, both in the Senate as well as in the House.

Fast Forward Congress 2011-2012 and you see now our overlap in the Senate is completely gone.

And in the House there is a big gap, a big distance between, between our Democrats and our Republicans.

And that is what we think of when we say polarization, the fact that the distance between Democrats and Republicans has increased over time.

And that has of course, implications for the Way they make policies right.

It is increasingly difficult to make policies in a polarized Congress because where would they start?

They have no common overlap. They have no common ground. And so bipartisanship is utterly challenging in a polarized Congress.

But there is one more observation that is striking, and for that I would like you to look at the House in particular, the Republican Party in the House over time.

Have a look, starting again with our Congress in the 70s, what happens to our Republicans in the House?

Can you see it? What's happening? So polarization is not symmetrical. It is an asymmetrical polarization. Republicans have more, more towards the right than Democrats have moved towards the left, towards liberalism.

Let me show you just once again what that looks like.

If we compare conferences over time, Democrats have changed only slightly.

They have become only slightly more liberal on certain issues, especially racial issues, social justice in general.

But overall, their ideology has not changed that dramatically, neither in the House nor in the Senate.

But look at our Republicans in both the House and the Senate.

They have changed much more. They have moved much more towards the right, towards conservatism.

That is why it's asymmetrical. It is mostly driven by Republicans moving more towards the right.

So it's really interesting how we see these big changes among Republicans in the House and the Senate, and there's only a fraction of that change visible among Democrats in the Senate and in the House.

And all of this will matter, by the way, again, when we talk about voters, because I will show you at one point this semester that, yes, Congress is polarized, as we can see, but American voters are not.

American voters have not shifted as much as their political parties.

Americans preferences have also remained somewhat stable over the past few years while Congress has changed the matter.

Any questions about this? I love this graph. It is so. It is so informative and really shows, right, like how Congress's composition, the way Congress works, is changing right in front of our eyes just with that data.

Okay, well, enough of that. Let us move on and talk a little bit about the people of the hour, namely our presidential candidates.

Nowadays, we see them everywhere on our screens, our boats, our computers, and of course, our TVs.

Right? And it's very easy to assume that the American presidency is so essential that it can either make or break American democracy.

Right? We have the that everything about how American democracy works depends on who will end up in the White House.

That seems to be a narrative that we're hearing a lot these days during election season.

And to be fair, the president is a very powerful position Very powerful person, right?

The chief politician of the country, the chief party leader, commercial commander in chief.

So no doubt the US President is a powerful role in the American political system.

But compared to many other political systems, the US President is actually when we compare executives across political systems, we realize that the US Presidents is surprisingly weak.

Right? And this is true not only if you compare the Presidency to countries like Russia or Egypt or Turkey, but also when you compare the presidency to other European nations like France and like Germany or even like the uk The US Presidency is surprisingly weak.

How can we make sense of that comparison is so weak, while at the same time we hear so much about the unbounded?

Like, don't forget my first or second week of our class together.

It's a system of checks and balances. In the US the executive no doubt is powerful, but the executive also has significant checks on death power.

And today's lecture on Wednesday will hopefully clarify just how many safeguards there are against abuse of presidential power.

Right. Just how bounded the President is by the Constitution.

And so we're starting off with the Constitution.

The Presidency is established in Article 2 of the U.S.

constitution. Right. And is described as the executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.

That is what our first section, Article 2, declares.

And the President's Oath of office empowers the chief Executive, the President, to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.

So when it comes to those descriptions, the Constitution is quite clear.

Now, when it comes to the powers of the Presidency, we're entering somewhat murky waters.

There are three different types of presidential powers.

The very first one expressed express powers. And we find those directly listed in Article 2 of the Constitution.

That is why we call them express. They are directly stated in Article 2 of the Constitution.

And it includes powers like making treaties, granting pardons, or commanding the military.

Those are directly stated in Article 2. But then we also have the so called implied powers.

And you have heard the word implied powers before.

What was the context there? When was the last time we talked about implied powers?

When was the last time we talked about implied powers?

Yes. And do you know which institution it was? Which institution also has implied powers? The Federal government in particular. Thank you. It's Congress. Right. Remember, Congress too has expressed powers and also implied powers.

So remind me again, what are implied powers for? What are those implied powers for? Absolutely right. So those are the powers that allow the President to make use of their expressed powers.

So implied powers are the powers that allow the President to make use or to exercise their express powers.

So because they are in flight. They are not directly stated in the US Constitution, but they are inferred from the expressed powers.

They are inferred from the expressed powers. And there are many, to be honest, right? Think about executive orders. They are not in the Constitution, but the Supreme Court in the past has ruled that those express powers right that executive orders are necessary right to make use of express powers.

So executive order is an example of an implied power.

Or think about the power to declare war. Who has that power? Who can declare war? It is Congress. Congress has the power to declare war. And yet. And yet the President can send troops to battle even without congressional approval.

That too is an implied power. Because remember, the President is commander in and as such, he has the implied power to send troops abroad even without congressional approval.

There is a small caveat to that, just for the sake of comprehension, that if even after 60 days, there is still no congressional approval, the troops must return back home.

But you see here, once again, see that there are implied powers that are supposed to help the President to make use of his express powers.

Right? Implied powers. And then last but not least, we have the delegated powers.

And they are just really, really weird. Let me start with that. They're just really weird because those are powers that conquer grants the press President to help Congress fulfill its legislative duties.

Let that sink in. Those are powers granted by Congress to the President so the President can help Congress fulfill its legislative duties.

And this might make much more sense to you if you know that the executive branch, right, also includes the federal bureaucracy.

The executive branch also includes the federal bureaucracy.

Now, can you possibly think of a reason why Congress would voluntarily, voluntarily give up power and grant that power to the President, to the Executive branch?

Wasn't one lesson of this semester that no institution wants to give up power?

And now I'm telling you that those delegated powers are given up by Congress voluntarily to the President, to the executive branch.

Why would that make any sense? How can we make sense of that? I like it. It's much more practical, though. Think about how many laws Congress signs, passes every year.

What happens after Congress signs those bills into law?

Congress is removed from that process. Congress does not have the resources or the expertise to implement and enforce its own laws.

Think about it for a second. So they talk about these big bills, all of these big laws that really affect a large share of Americans.

But the problem is that Congress does not have the resources or the time or the expertise or the personnel to implement those very laws and to enforce them.

So they hand over the Law implementation process to the bureaucracy.

So the bureaucracy gets to implement those laws that Congress passes.

And that makes sense when you think about it. Right? Most of the laws that Congress passes, they're really broad.

They have a goal like improve Americans healthcare access.

That's a very broad goal. But how exactly do you do that? And so once Congress finally passes a law, they basically hand over that law to the executive branch, to the bureaucracy, and they say, figure it out.

You do the hard work of implementing and enforcing these laws.

So here we really have an exceptional case where an institution in the American political system voluntarily gives up that power because they are very aware of their own resource constraints.

Right. And those are our delegated powers. And all of this will make much more sense once we talk about the bureaucracy next week when we actually get to see how the President impacts the bureaucracy.

But for now, those are our three main powers that the President has at their disposal.

So let's have a closer look at some of these powers.

What exactly does the Constitution say? The first type of power to look at is of course, the executive power.

The President must see that all laws are faithfully executed.

And that also includes that the President gets to appoint and supervise all executive officers.

That includes also ambassadors, ministers, and federal judges.

But as a check on the Presidency, those appointments require approval from the Senate.

So the President cannot simply nominate or appoint whoever he wants.

There needs to be Senate approval as well. And then the President also has something that we call executive privilege at his disposal.

Executive privilege. What exactly is that? Executive privilege? President Nixon was quite famous for it. What is it? Absolutely right. So the claim that confidential communication between the President and his close advisors should not be revealed without the consent of the President.

So confidential communication between the President and the close advisors.

Now why would that be the case? Aren't you always saying that democracy depends on transparency?

How could we possibly justify that? The President can claim executive privilege, can withhold certain information from the public.

If the secrecy is needed for the sake of the nation.

If it's. What if the secrecy is needed for the sake of the nation?

Absolutely right. So national security, for example, that's a very common reason that presidents, they say, I cannot reveal this communication with my advisors because the communication was about national security.

Therefore I cannot share it with the public. Now, for an honest time, that just was executive privilege.

And there were barely any limits on that place. So in theory, presidents could have just argued all the time, well, it's national security, so it cannot share the communication.

But of course, there has to be a limit somewhere Right.

And that limit was tested during the war scandal, in particular during the Supreme Court case.

United states convicted in 1974. Right. Again, this is a really important Supreme Court case because it was the very first time the Supreme Court was asked to define the limits of executive privilege.

The question was, is there even a limit to executive privilege?

And now, don't forget, this was a really complicated case.

During the Watergate scandal, President Nixon was subpoenaed to produce tape recordings and documents that led to his communications in the White House.

And of course, President Nixon argued, this is confidential communication between me and my advisors in the White House.

Therefore it is protected by executive privilege.

Right. Now, the Supreme Court, of course, heard the case.

And what did they argue? Did they agree with Nixon or did they disagree with President Nixon on the problem of executive privilege?

Did the court say, yep, Nixon is right, this is still all executive privilege, or did they actually put a limit on executive privilege?

Say what? Absolutely they disagreed with them and disagree strongly and unanimously in a Supreme Court decision, unanimously ruled that executive privilege is not absolute.

It is not an absolute privilege. Right. The Court said, and I quote here, the President does have the right to confidentiality in communications, but this privilege cannot be used to withhold evidence in a criminal investigation.

In a criminal investigation that involves the President, the President cannot claim executive privilege.

This is significant because what the Court said basically is that no one, not even the President, is above the law.

And that's a really important conclusion to draw, that when it comes to presidential powers, there are checks on the presidency, there are safeguards against the abuse of presidential power.

And that is why the Supreme Court case is so important.

One of the first cases to define the limits of executive privilege.

And of course, how did all of this end after the Supreme Court's decision?

What happened? Yeah, impeachment. Sorry, didn't they try to impeach Nixon? Well, you know that he eventually had to hand over the tapes and then he resigned.

Resignation. So as you can see, this court case has severe implications for the trajectory of the Presidency.

All right, those are our executive powers for now.

But as the head of the executive branch, the President has more than just executive powers.

He also has legislative powers. And they are always underrated legislative powers.

The very first one is that the President gets to address Congress on the State of the Union.

And I know that probably nobody watches their union anymore, but it's actually a pretty important agenda setting tool.

It's a pretty important agenda setting tool. How so? How does the State of the Union set an agenda and for whom exactly Exactly.

Not yet. The State of the Union. So it sets the public policy agenda for Congress.

The President tells Congress, here is what I expect you to address in your legislative session.

So he puts pressure on members of Congress by directly formulating his expectations for what Congress should address.

But Congress isn't the only institution that is being addressed by civilians.

Who else is being addressed? Address not just Congress, but also us as voters.

Right? That's the reason why we get to watch it. Right. It's one way to hold the President accountable because that's what he tells us he is going to do.

And then years later, we can refer back to that speech.

We can refer back to those expectations and those promises and see whether those promises were delivered.

So again, this is a pretty important tool for Presidents to influence Congress to make sure that Congress is aware of the President's policy preferences and to make sure the voters are aware of the President of policy preferences as well.

That's the first way that Presidents can influence the lawmaking process.

But there are also more significant, more direct ways.

For example, the President can veto turn down acts of Congress.

So the President can veto bills past his Congress.

Now, a caveat here. Congress in turn can override a presidential Veto with a 2/3 majority in the House and the Senate.

So here we see the interaction of the President and Congress when it comes to making laws.

We tend to think of Congress as the main actor when it comes to making and passing laws.

But the President has significant influence on that process as well.

Let me show you what. Here we have a beautiful, beautiful overview of the veto process.

So have a look in the upper left corner, right? Our bill passes Congress and then it goes to the President.

And then that bill is being reviewed by multiple other people.

It is not just the President and Congress. It is also the President's special assistance. The upper management, budget department heads and other leaders in the President's party, but also lobbyists and even the Justice Department.

They are all involved in this process of reviewing the bill that Congress just passed, Right?

And let's just say the President finds the bill acceptable, right?

He approves of the bill. So normally what happens, the President signs, right?

Then there is a neat little public ceremony, and all of a sudden our bill has become law.

That's, I guess, the ideal way that it should work.

But of course, sometimes the President does not approve of the bill, Right.

He does not agree with the bill. That is when the veto process starts. Right. So then the President can veto the bill once again after many other people reviewed the veto.

Right. And Then it's being returned to Congress. Our bill goes back to Congress after the President decides to veto it.

And then there are two possible outcomes after either Congress, Congress is able to gather a two thirds majority in the House and in the Senate to override the presidential veto.

If that is the case, then our bill lives on and becomes law.

Right. So if Congress is able to gather a 2 1st majority in both the House and the Senate, they can override our Presidential.

If they are not able to get that kind of a supermajority, then our bill dies.

Now, again, thinking about polarization, how difficult do you think it is to get a 2/3 majority in both the House and the Senate to override a veto?

If you had to guess, what's the impact of polarization on that process?

Yeah, of course. Right. It's increasingly difficult. Now, of course, if your party has the absolute majority in both the House and the Senate, different story.

But in most cases, that's not the case. In most cases, power is shared between both parties in the House and the Senate.

And so it's really, really hard to get a 2/3 majority in both the House and the Senate because it requires at least a few people from the other parties to join your coalition.

And that's just not happening anymore that frequently, that coalition between Democrats and Republicans to override the presidential veto.

That has not happened frequently in the past few decades as we have gotten more polarized in Congress.

So here we really see that the President has significant power to end a bill, right?

To end the bill's process and to veto it. However, there is another way that the President can veto.

And for that I would like you to look at the upper right corner.

Right. So, for example, our bill once again comes to the President, and maybe for 10 days our President does nothing.

He's not vetoing it, he's not signing it, he does nothing with the bill.

If that's the case, if the bill sits on the president's desk for 10 days, then the bill becomes a law.

But here is the case. If Congress is no longer in session, if they have adjourned for the year, then our bill becomes law.

So if the bill once again sits on the president's desk for 10 days and Congress is adjourned, then our bill becomes a law because the bill cannot be returned to Congress because Congress is no longer in session.

And we call this a pocket veto because you can imagine that the President puts the bill in his pocket and lets it disappear.

That's a pocket eater. When the bill remains unsigned for 10 days and Congress is adjourned.

Our bill dies quietly and silently now. Kind of strange. Right pocket veto. Why would the President make use of a pocket veto?

Why not simply vetoing the bill right away and directly?

Why make use of that pocket detail? How can we justify the existence of the pocket? Any ideas? Why do we even have this weird thing, the pocket? I like it. Right. So it seems to have something to do with polarization.

It seems to have something to do with opposing your own party.

And that's exactly the reasons why residents use Pocket videos.

There are multiple and I listed here only three of them.

The very first one is avoiding political fallout.

So maybe a president does not want to take a stance on a constitutional issue.

They can avoid taking a stance by using the pocket veto because no one can accuse them of taking a stance on that issue.

They didn't do anything. They let the bill die quietly without taking a stance on the issue.

This particular importance if you are an incumbent, if you want to run for office again, you don't want to give the other side potential material to criticize you when you run for re election.

So a pocket veto is an easy way out. You can avoid taking a stance on a particular issue.

That's the first reason. The second reason is that maybe you just want to prevent an overwrite.

Right? Because you cannot overwrite a pocket veto as Congress.

You can only overwrite a Veto with a 2 1st majority in both the House and the Senate.

But the trick of the pocket veto is that Congress is no longer in session.

They aren't working right now. And when they aren't working, then you cannot return the bill to Congress.

So Congress has no chance to overturn it. They are all back in their own home states. Right. And so here the pocket veto is a way to guarantee that Congress cannot override your particular bill, your particular veto.

Sorry. And then the final reason is a strategic delay. Sometimes presidents might think that a particular bill requires more work, that requires more consideration from Congress.

So essentially they use the pocket veto to send the bill back to Congress.

Right. And maybe they don't want to take a stance on the issue.

Again, maybe they just want Congress to to delay passing a bill, to delay turning the bill into law, for the strategic delay of a bill becoming a law.

Those are all reasons why presidents use this pocket here.

And again, you might think that sounds kind of problematic, right?

Because it seems to give president the power of an absolute veto.

And that is that in the past few presidency we have seen no pocket detail.

Have a look at this. Despite the fact that the pocket beater is a tool at the President's disposal.

And despite the fact that we have become more polarized in Congress, the pocket leader is not a particular favored tool by presidents.

Right? Neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump, nor Barack Obama or W.

Bush even have made use of the public veto, even though it's at their disposal, and even though legislation has been are more difficult as we have gotten more polarized.

Yet, presidents have not made use of the property though.

And I will let you go if you give me one reason why they haven't made use of those proper years.

It's in their power. Why are they using it? Most likely when they detail a bill, the bill has been issued by the opposing party.

Presidents want to claim credit for blocking legislation by and with that

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