Republicans and Executive Power

I have a hard time taking Republican claims that conservatives have always feared an overreaching executive seriously.  It requires airbrushing out about 40 years of our quite recent history, from 1968 to 2008. 

This is not to deny that Republicans feared executive overreach during the Roosevelt era, which one can extend from 1933 all the way up to the mid '60's.  Democrats controlled the presidency most of the time from 1933 to 1968, except for eight years of the liberal Republican Eisenhower.  This was the era of the imperial presidency when the power of the executive branch expanded to an extraordinary degree but the restraints and safeguards did not.  There were serious abuses of power, generally escalating.*  But the apogee of the imperial presidency was in the Republican, Richard Nixon.  It was under Nixon that the full scope of abuses came out, and a Democratic Congress began taking measure to reign in the abuses of the executive branch, over the resistance of Nixon and his Republican successors.  Granted, there was a measure of hypocrisy there.  The complaint that Democrats in Congress ignored the abuses until a Republican started committing them has some validity.  Nonetheless, the abuses were real and needed reigning in.

Furthermore, Nixon began an era of Republican dominance of the presidency, even as Democrats continued to control Congress.  From 1968 to 1992, Republicans held the presidency all but four year.  Furthermore, they won all all their elections by landslides, with the sole exception of 1968.  And the 1968 election was complicated by a third party candidacy of George Wallace.  Counting each vote for Wallace as a vote for Nixon, 1968 was a Republican landslide as well.  The Democrats' only victory during this time was by Jimmy Carter, in the wake of Watergate, against the only person ever to serve as both President and Vice President without being elected to either office.  It could be dismissed as an anomaly.  And Republicans during this time became increasingly champions of executive power.  It was during this time that the theory of the unitary executive began to become popular.  Antonin Scalia was a great champion of executive power.  William Barr, Donald Trump's new Attorney General, served as Attorney General under Bush I and was a strong champion of executive power.  Attempts to reign in the President were denounced on the right as the work of an "imperial Congress." 

The Clinton Presidency was a major shock to Republicans, who had assumed that there would never be a Democratic President again.  They managed to dismiss him as an illegitimate anomaly, the freak result of a third party candidate in Ross Perot.  And, as  such, Republicans continued to be champions of presidential power, especially the power to cut spending.  There was much talk, for instance of allowing the President a line item veto or other ways of reducing spending beyond what Congress authorized.

And this is to say nothing of the Bush II presidency, in which the theory of the "unitary executive" was effectively taken to mean that the President could do anything, including things expressly banned by Congress such as indefinite detention, warrantless surveillance, and torture, so long as he said "national security" first.  David Addington and John Yoo became notorious for their championship of such ideas. 

Then, on January 20, 2009, the day Obama was inaugurated, Republicans suddenly became greatly alarmed about an overreaching executive.  Even then, they could dismiss his election as an anomaly, the result of a deeply unpopular war and the worst economic crisis since 1929.  But with his reelection in 2012, it became clear that Democratic Presidents would happen quite regularly and the Republican freakout became epic.  People who applauded indefinite detention, warrantless surveillance, and torture as executive prerogative even when forbidden by law started to see tweaking of regulations as monstrous acts of tyranny and refraining from deporting people illegally brought to the US as children as the end of America. 

Yeah, I know, the mommy party and the daddy party. Bush was claiming unlimited ability to exercise daddy powers, which are all find and good, while Obama was committing the monstrous tyranny of using mommy powers.  But honestly, the sight of Republicans going from championing unlimited executive power to suddenly proclaiming their fear of an out-of-control executive happened so suddenly it could almost give you whiplash.  And the sight of Republican proclaiming that they have "always" feared an out-of-control executive so soon after championing just that is positively disgusting.

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*It is not clear to me that Truman was worse than Roosevelt in that regard, or Eisenhower worse than Truman, but certainly Kennedy was worse than Eisenhower, Johnson worse than Kennedy, and Nixon worst of all.