After a military flyover during Bill Clinton’s inauguration, then-Hollywood liberal Ron Silver was reportedly outraged by the militaristic display. Until, that is, it hit him: “Hey, those planes are ours now,” the late actor allegedly quipped.
Whether that story is apocryphal, or not (I’ve been hearing about it since 1993 when Rush Limbaugh mentioned it on his TV show), the sentiment certainly rings true: Having won the presidency, concerns about the excesses of power quickly fade.
The Silver anecdote came back to me recently, not during the July 4 debate about military parades but rather with the release of a new report on how Republicans are suddenly open to the idea of expanding presidential power. According to the Pew Research Center’s study, “About half of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (51%) now say it would be too risky to give presidents more power, down from 70% last year.”
Why the change of heart? Some of this could be written off as the predictably convenient volte-face that takes place when parties gain or lose the presidency (see the GOP’s recent conclusion that debt and deficits don’t matter). Many of the same Republicans who thought Barack Obama’s unilateral executive order on DACA was unconstitutional were more than willing to enable Trump to usurp their power of the purse on a border wall.
In other words, it’s politics. Ever since Thomas Jefferson cast aside his small government principles in favor of the Louisiana Purchase, nearly doubling the size of America, these convenient contradictions have existed.
Those brave souls who wish to remain consistently opposed to executive overreach must grapple with a catch-22: Upon winning the White House, the erstwhile outsiders suddenly have a vested interest in increasing their own power, as well as the size of government.
This tendency has been quickened by 20th century technological developments. For example, the weighty decision to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike (which we have essentially vested in the hands of the Commander in Chief since Harry Truman) cannot wait for a vote of Congress.
The medium of television likewise lends itself to coverage of one charismatic “decider” (as opposed to boring legislative talk and gridlock). A president who takes control is generally viewed as a decisive leader and a man of action.
For most rank-and-file Republicans, this reassessment of the presidency is an unconscious recalibration. The last time I recall Republicans making a concerted push to expand executive power was when then-Vice President Dick Cheney was on a mission to restore the power of the presidency. Having served as Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, Cheney believed the 1973 War Powers Act—enacted after Vietnam and during the early stages of the Watergate scandal—infringed on a president’s rightful authority.
Never mind the fact that the executive branch had, prior to that, been steadily gaining power—Cheney, at least, had a rationale.
In the interregnum between Cheney and Trump, Republicans were, understandably, more skeptical about Barack Obama’s unilateral acts.
But while this shift in opinion is partly about rank partisan politics, the Pew study may also reflect a more permanent, if incipient, shift on the right: Libertarian concerns about big government have given way to a nationalistic strain that has a greater affinity for authority and order.
This nascent nationalism was most recently highlighted by the National Conservative Conference in Washington, D.C., which featured prominent names such as Tucker Carlson and bestselling author J.D. Vance.
While it’s hard to pinpoint a single coherent theme, as one writer at the Federalist put it, “Ultimately, [the rise of nationalism on the right] appears to be a return to a more old-fashioned conservatism, one aimed at harnessing authority to maximize social good.”
This isn’t an overt call for increasing the president’s power, although that seems to be a likely externality, at least so long as Donald Trump is in the White House.
Conservatives who still care about the Founders’ vision of a balance of power in which Congress is the “first” among the co-equal branches of government are battling against the zeitgeist.
Those are our planes now.
