In the previous discussion we have detailed how the executive has managed to expand its power in relation to Congress in the area of foreign policy. However, although the president may find himself in a more dominant position in relation to Congress, the American system is still one of separated powers. Congress still remains an important actor in the policy-making process. This section will focus on how the president attempts to work with Congress and under what circumstances he can expect his influence to be strongest.
122 Dumbrell, J. (1997) The Making of U.S. Foreign Policy (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp96-101
123 George, A. (1980) Presidential Decisionmaking in Foreign Policy: The Effective Use of Information and Advice (Boulder, Frederick A. Praeger., pp177-187
124 Greenstein, F. (2004) The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to George W. Bush (Princeton:
Princeton University Press), pp107-109
There is a large body of literature centred on the issue of presidential-congressional relations. Broadly it can be split into three categories. Those, such as Edwards, who argue that the separation of powers severely limits the ability of the president to influence Congress; those, such as Jones, who adopt a midway position, arguing that although the US does not have a presidential system, there is a distinct role to be played by the president at certain times; and a final group who argue that the expansion of presidential power has led to the emergence of an “executive hegemony”.125 The purpose of this analysis is not to review this literature in substantial detail. Instead, working from this foundation, we wish to determine how the president attempts to “win over” Congress to successfully implement his foreign policy agenda.
The first major hurdle any president must face is what is now commonly known as the
“expectations gap”. Most lay observers of American politics do not fully comprehend the complexities of the system of checks and balances. Combined with a selective interpretation of history that tends to emphasise the achievements of the great presidents, many citizens expect the president to take charge of government and initiate the wholesale changes his supporters demand. The problem is that Congress stands in the way. The president may propose legislation, but it is Congress who decides to enact it or not.126
The president must also face up to the fact that Congress is not a unified institution, even if his party is in the majority. Each Congressman and Senator represents a constituency whose own interests, needs and preferences will usually be very different from the president’s. With the threat of re-election constantly in their minds, Congressmen will often be forced to support the local parochial needs of their constituents rather than addressing the president’s national and foreign agenda. Although this can hamper the president’s attempts at Congressional leadership, in other cases it actually helps him. The parochial interests of Congressmen limit their ability to present a unified front. This provides the executive with an institutional advantage that has proved conducive to leadership in foreign policy.
The task facing the president then is attempting to persuade individual lawmakers in order to get them to vote in favour of the executive’s proposal. A large amount of a president’s time is therefore spent trying to build coalitions of Congressmen, often cutting across party lines,
125 Edwards, G.C. (1989) At the Margins: Presidential Leadership of Congress (New Haven, Yale University Press); Jones, C.O. (2005) ‘The Presidency in A Separated System’ in J. P. Pfiffner and R. H. Davidson eds.
Understanding the Presidency (New York: Pearson Education, Inc); Spitzer, R.J. (2005) ‘Is the Separation of Powers Obsolete? The Congressional-Presidential Balance of Power’ in J. P. Pfiffner and R. H. Davidson eds.
Understanding the Presidency (New York: Pearson Education, Inc)
126 Waterman, R.W, Jenkins-Smith, H. and Silva, C. (1999) ‘The Expectations Gap Thesis: Public Attitudes Towards an Incumbent President’, The Journal of Politics, 61(4), pp944-966
in order to secure the required majority for a bill to pass. To do this, the president has several methods at his disposal.
The most direct way the president can influence individual lawmakers is to grant them favours. These can take many forms, but the general idea is for the president to use his power and influence to benefit the lawmaker or his constituency. In return this generates leverage for the president that he can use in the lead up to important votes. The greatest resource the president has in this respect is his power of patronage. He can greatly influence the selection of a wide range of high-ranking government positions. Granting the right job to the right person in the right constituency can quickly win the support of lawmakers. The president can also influence the location of government construction projects which will bring benefits to the local community. Likewise, the president can threaten to withhold these resources in order to ensure the compliance of lawmakers.127
The president also has less direct methods of influencing Congress. He can appeal to the public and pressure groups in order to mobilise their support against Congress. The president uses this tactic in the hope that constituents will put pressure on their Congressman and thus force them to support the president. However, such measures are not without risk. By going over the heads of Congressmen the president may incur longer-term hostility and more determined opposition.128
Pika and Maltese have argued that, in their dealings with Congress, presidents adopt one of three patterns of behaviour. The first and most predominant method is bargaining. This will involve granting or withholding favours, as discussed above, but presidents must be wary of indulging in this tactic too often as they only have a limited amount of resources to distribute and the demand for these favours from Congress exceeds the supply. 129 The second method employed by presidents is that of “arm-twisting”. Instead of the mutual cooperation of bargaining, arm-twisting involves “intense, even extraordinary, pressure and threats.”130 This tactic runs the risk of generating resentment and hostility, but “judicious demonstration that sustained opposition or desertion by normal supporters will exact costs strengthens a president’s bargaining position.”131 The most extreme method the president can deploy is direct confrontation. This may involve appealing to the public to pressure their Congressman, but can range to the president challenging Congressional authority or claiming presidential
127 Pika, J.A. and Maltese, J.A. (2004) The Politics of the Presidency (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press), p194
128 Ibid., p193
129 Ibid., pp199-200
130 Ibid., p199
131 Ibid., p200
prerogative. A president will usually only adopt this as a last ditch short-run tactic as it will likely generate sustained Congressional opposition if used too often.132
Having established what methods a president possesses in the legislative arena, we must now try to establish under what conditions he is likely to generate legislative support. In the realm of foreign policy it is quite clear that crises provide the president with the greatest opportunity to exert leadership. Under crisis conditions the president can usually expect to receive the support of the majority of Congress due to the fact that the president enjoys institutional advantages to respond to crises that are lacking in Congress. Although domestic crises are comparably rare, the realm of foreign policy is more likely to produce national security crises thus strengthening the president’s position in relation to Congress.133 Presidents elected with a clear electoral mandate are also better placed to win over Congress than those whose winning electoral margin is smaller. George W. Bush serves as an excellent example of both these factors. Inaugurated after the highly controversial election of November 2000, winning the electoral vote but losing the popular vote, the first eight months of his presidency produced a mixed relationship with Congress as he struggled to promote his bold conservative agenda. However, the terrorist attacks of September 11 produced a crisis that transformed his presidency. Enlisting the support of Congress he had the Patriot Act passed and sent US forces to war in both Afghanistan and Iraq.134
The nature of the opposition in Congress also largely impacts a president’s ability to legislate successfully. The greater the number of seats held by the opposition party and the greater the strength of their ideological opposition, the more difficult a president will find it trying to promote his agenda.135 However, a skilled president will be able to reduce the effectiveness of congressional opposition buy engaging in well-executed coalition building.
President Johnson was particularly noted for his political skill in the legislative arena.136 The final question we must address is how often the president is successful in his relationship with Congress. To answer this question we must engage with the literature mentioned at the start of this section. George Edwards has argued strongly that presidential
132 Ibid., p200
133 Hamilton, L. (2005) ‘The Making of US Foreign Policy: The Roles of the President and Congress Over Four Decades’ in Thurber, J. (eds) Rivals for Power: Presidential-Congressional Relations (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield) pp267-302
134 Kaufman, J. (2010) A Concise History of US Foreign Policy (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield), pp130-153
135 Cronin, T.E. and Genovese, M.A. (2004) The Paradoxes of the American Presidency (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p168
136 Greenstein, F. (2004) The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to George W. Bush (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press), p88
leadership of Congress is typically at the margins, not the core, of policymaking.137 The resources available to the president are limited and he struggles to expand them when required. He is unable to drastically change the political landscape and instead must rely on his ability to exploit opportunities in the political environment when they present themselves.
By himself the president will be unable to alter public policy. As a result, Edwards argues that the president must be viewed as a facilitator in the coalition building process rather than a dominant executive leader.138
Edwards is correct that the president operates in a system of separated powers. He has no constitutional authority to lead Congress anywhere they do not wish to go and cannot force them to legislate as he pleases. He is also correct to criticise those who place too much emphasis on the president as the sole source of political change in American politics.
However, all serious commentators on the presidential-congressional relationship are aware that it is just that, a relationship. Neither can govern without the other. What the opponents of Edwards argue is that he underestimates the role the president plays not just as a facilitator in the coalition building process, but also as an initiator of policy, as the spark that starts the system moving. In a later analysis, Edwards and Barrett actually provide information to support this claim. They show that the president can almost always place significant legislation on the agenda of Congress, that the president generates about one-third of significant bills on the congressional agenda and that presidential initiatives are more likely to become law than congressional initiatives. Under united government, when the president’s party controls Congress, the rate of successful presidential initiatives is nearly twice that under divided government. 139
The methodology employed by Edwards has been criticised by Spitzer.140 He argues that Edwards’ studies are “are limited in their scope and applicability. The focus on the specific concept of presidential success as measured by roll-call votes precludes the multiplicity of decision points where the two branches interact up to the roll-call vote – in other words, most of the realm in which the two branches interact.”141 Spitzer argues that by classifying the president’s role as “marginal” Edwards manages to ignore two centuries of evolving
137 Edwards, G.C. (1989) At the Margins: Presidential Leadership of Congress (New Haven: Yale University Press)
138 Ibid
139 Edwards, G.C. and Barrett, A. (2000) “Presidential Agenda Setting in Congress” in Polarized Politics:
Congress and the President in a Partisan Era, edited by Jon R. Bonds and Richard Fleisher (Washington D.C.: CQ Press), pp120-127
140 Spitzer, R.J. (2005) ‘Is the Separation of Powers Obsolete? The Congressional-Presidential Balance of Power’
in J. P. Pfiffner and R. H. Davidson eds. Understanding the Presidency (New York: Pearson Education, Inc)
141 Ibid., p301
institutional arrangements and political development which Skowronek has described as “an evolutionary sequence culminating in the expanded powers and governing responsibilities of the ‘modern presidency.’”142 It can be argued that “marginal” and “leader” are poles on a continuum and the influence of the president will be found somewhere in between. However, it is clear that the president has gradually acquired powers and responsibilities over a long period of time that pushes his influence closer to that of a leader than a marginal figure, but due to the separation and sharing of powers he will never be able to fully dominate Congress in the manner expected by the less informed members of the public.
In the area of foreign policy we have seen how the powers of the presidency have increased in relation to the Congress. Presidents have tried to minimise the involvement of Congress in foreign policy, particularly in the area of national security and defence policy, but it is impossible for any president to avoid dealing with Congress. Clearly if any president is to be successful in his relationship with Congress he must be willing to engage constructively with the legislature in the hope of securing their cooperation.
3.9 Conclusion
This chapter has focused on the role of the president in US foreign policy. It has demonstrated that, from seemingly humble constitutional origins, the presidency has developed into the most important institution in US foreign policy making. The constitution created a system of separated institutions sharing power but over the course of two centuries the executive has expanded its powers in relation to the Congress. As highlighted above, this was often the direct result of the specific actions of an individual president. It was argued that individual presidents often expanded the foreign policy powers of the office in order to achieve specific foreign policy objectives, but in doing so they set a precedent that over time produced a cumulative effect whereby more and more foreign policy power was centralised in the White House. The important point to note is that this chapter does not argue that the president is in sole command of US foreign policy. His powers are always defined in relation to the other branches of government as well as the bureaucracy, the American public and the international system. However, it has been demonstrated that of all the domestic sources of US foreign policy, the president finds himself in the most privileged position. Through the combination of factors discussed above it is clear that there is a large scope for presidential
142 In ibid., p301
agency in US foreign policy. This chapter also serves a second purpose. It provides the domestic framework within which to analyse the case studies to be discussed in the following chapters. Having looked at the presidency in the abstract in this chapter, we now turn our attention to analyse the roles Presidents Truman and Reagan played in the formulation of their administrations’ foreign policy. In doing so we will look at the key factors outlined in this chapter: the constitutional standing of the presidency at the time of their inaugurations, the development of their worldview, their informal sources of power, their management of the executive bureaucracy, and their relationship with Congress.