When Reining In an Imperial President Was the Conservatives' Cause

Odd though it may seem, ideological conservatives used to be fierce critics of “executive supremacy.” For instance, in 1940, when Franklin D. Roosevelt sought a precedent-breaking third term, the archconservative Herbert Hoover warned that Roosevelt was a virtual dictator whose growing “personal power over the last seven years” came at the expense of a “disastrous weakening of the legislative and judicial branches ” with Congress “reduced to a rubber stamp for the executive.”

As the cold war raged, conservatives opposed to the centrist policies of President Dwight D. Eisenhower backed a constitutional amendment granting Congress the authority to curtail presidential treaty-making powers. It came within a single vote of passage in the Senate in 1954.

The battle was also fought on the intellectual front. In his book “Congress and the American Tradition,” the conservative thinker James Burnham argued that the Founders had envisioned a government in which “the preponderating share of power was held and exercised by the legislature,” primarily the House, since its members were directly accountable to their local constituents, unlike presidents, who wielded power through Caesarist manipulations of “the mob.”