Opposition to the Theory of Presidential Representation: Federalists, Whigs, and Republicans

Executive power has the advantage of concentration in a single head in whose choice the whole Nation has a part, making him the focus of public hopes and expectations. --Justice Robert Jackson, concurring opinion in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer (1952, 654) Robert Jackson's statement points to an enduring difficulty for scholars of presidential power. It argues that, in addition to formal sources of constitutional authority and in addition to the emergence of the president as party leader, there is a third source of presidential power, and that source is public opinion. Scholarship on the presidency has documented the importance of each of these three sources, and the emphasis on the one or the other has ebbed and flowed much like Jackson's description of executive power itself. In the last decade, scholars have variously rediscovered the formal powers of the unilateral presidency, expanded on continuing debates about the constitutionality of prerogative, and found new ways of measuring the extent to which presidents represent their parties or the whole. The problem is that simply reiterating and expounding upon each of the old arguments does little to clarify the nature of presidential representation. Some scholars today emphasize the legal and philosophic grounds for the arguments made by presidents and their opponents. This is especially true among scholars of executive prerogative, who have distinguished several models of prerogative, usually around the question of its constitutionality or extraconstitutionality. Other scholars emphasize the connection between the president and public opinion. For them, the essential point is that the appeal to public opinion has become a fundamental feature of the modern presidency. These different emphases are fine as far as they go, but in large part they talk past one another, and anyone who tries to navigate between them might be forgiven for coming away with a sense of crossed purposes. To be sure, some of the confusion derives from the nature of scholarly investigation and is the result of necessary specialization. But the larger obstacle to understanding presidential representation stems from our insistence on the "modern presidency" as an organizing concept. This is a historical construct, and in our search for the precise date of its appearance, we end up imputing to history a before-and-after moment. Looking for the moment of change, we risk missing what endures and misunderstanding the fruits of victory enjoyed momentarily by one or another set of winners. This article examines the development of the theory of presidential representation between 1800 and 1864. It does so with particular attention to the opposition to various presidential embellishments of the theory. My argument is that opposition responses were not just losers but integral parts of the development in view, that the theoretical and developmental linkages made between claims of executive power and claims of representation carry forward elements of the resistance encountered along with the new assertions. I find that by 1864, the question of presidential representation had become more complicated and more entangled with rival claims of authority, not less. But before I turn to the nineteenth century, let me consider recent scholarship on presidential representation in more detail. Foundations of Presidential Power The precise nature of the relationship between the presidency and the public remains a central concern of political science. Presidency scholars still disagree about whether the framers of 1787 designed the president to be democratic (Alvis 2013; Nichols 1994; Tulis 1988); whether going public actually works (Edwards 2006; Kernell 1997); whether the president follows or leads public opinion (Canes-Wrone 2005); and whether presidential mandates exist (Dahl 1990; Heidotting Conley 2001). There is wide disagreement as well about the character of presidential representation. …