The Constitutional Ambitions of James Madison's Presidency

Scholarship on the presidency remains frozen within the post-Neustadt perspective concerning the uniqueness of the "modern" presidency (Neustadt 1990). The study of the institution and actors in the past has long promised a thaw, but the melting thus far has been marginal. The dominance of Neustadt's approach has been problematized both by the rational choice scholars studying the presidency and by the historical approach that has already been taken by scholars like Stephen Skowronek (see, for instance, Moe and Howell 1999; Skowronek 1997). The former, however, have not so much moved beyond Neustadt's focus on power as formalized it (Skowronek 2009). They have continued to assume that presidents are primarily, if not solely, focused on the accumulation of political power. The latter, although having moved beyond Neustadt's focus on power, have focused so much on the question of political authority, in its connection to the wielding of power, that they have failed to appreciate the ideational origins of the very concern for authority (Siemers 2009). They have failed to appreciate that presidents seek political authority--not just to wield power--but also to instantiate themselves in history as a certain kind of president only willing to do certain kinds of things. In other words, precisely because of the grandness of the stage on which presidents act, any reductionist account of their ambitions will necessarily do violence to some portion of their motivations and corresponding actions. Just as Neustadt's single-minded focus on power could not really account for Eisenhower's odd behavior as president, so too, as Skowronek (1997) himself admits, his focus on the presidential quest for political authority in different political times and the frictions that quest inevitably creates cannot account for the relative lack of such frictions in Eisenhower's presidency. The grandness of the presidential stage certainly does invite presidents to seek political power and authority so as to wield it to achieve the "extensive and arduous enterprises" about which Hamilton (Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay 2003, 436) wrote so eloquently; but, the vagueness of the Constitution's definition of presidential power also permits presidents to create their legacy as much by the manner in which they occupy the constitutional office as by that which they do with it. Although the Constitution certainly encourages a certain kind of presidency, it still allows presidents to mold the office in a manner that comports with their conception of the proper constitutional presidency. And this possibility means that any deterministic account of presidential behavior will always fail to appreciate that any given president does not simply act within a predetermined constitutional order of the presidency; instead, presidents can do as much to shape for themselves, based on their constitutional ideas, the office in which they then preside. James Madison's presidency is fascinating because his own prior worries about the "extra-constitutional" scope of presidential power caused him to pursue a far more constitutionally restrained presidency. One cannot understand Madison's presidency without understanding Madison's thoughts about the presidency. Using Madison's presidency to appreciate the essential importance of a president's constitutional conception of the office also helps us to make sense, more recently, of the critical differences between the Barack Obama and the George W. Bush presidencies. Although Obama has wielded power in many of the same ways as Bush did before him, his constitutional conception of the office seems much more limited than his predecessor. In other words, Madison's presidency shows us that the Constitution does not merely establish the "rules of the game" in which the president seeks to achieve political authority and wield power. Instead, the constitutional presidency itself can be actively shaped by its occupants. …