No. of Recommendations: 5
I found it interesting that no matter how much detail you provide regarding the law, and supporting links, some people insist that a potus can just bypass all that.This is not uncommon. Nor limited to conservatives. It even has a name - the Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency. Ezra Klein wrote a nice summary of it (in the context of the Obama Administration). Here's the core:
According to Brendan Nyhan, the Dartmouth political scientist who coined the term, the Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency is "the belief that the president can achieve any political or policy objective if only he tries hard enough or uses the right tactics." In other words, the American president is functionally all-powerful, and whenever he can't get something done, it's because he's not trying hard enough, or not trying smart enough.https://www.vox.com/2014/5/20/5732208/the-green-la...Many people, on all points of the political spectrum, don't really acknowledge that there are very real constraints on the power of the Presidency. When a President from their coalition gets elected, they really want to believe that all of their preferred policies are now
possible to get elected. When a President from the opposing coalition gets elected, they really want to believe that all of the negative things happening in the country (or the world) are that President's fault. The very real limits on Presidential power caused by checks and balances, the inertia of existing laws and budget allocations, and the tensions caused by irreconcilable positions
within the two major-party coalitions are....well, they're annoying and upsetting.
It doesn't mean they think the President is a dictator, or should be. They just don't really think about the fact that we have a kind of weird form of government that gives the head of government a lot less power than in Parliamentary systems, and that being the Leader of the Free World doesn't mean that you have god-like powers to dictate foreign events.
