150 years ago today, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. It was, “based on the president’s constitutional authority as commander in chief of the armed forces; it was not a law passed by Congress. It proclaimed all those enslaved in Confederate territory to be forever free, and ordered the Army (and all segments of the Executive branch) to treat as free all those enslaved in ten states that were still in rebellion, thus applying to 3.1 million of the 4 million slaves in the U.S.,” (Wikipedia).
This type of proclamation is today considered by many to be a gross overuse of Presidential authority. Thus, when the President today uses his authority to make recess appointments because Congress will allow few of his nominees to go through the normal process, that is the charge that is made. But, if one looks at the good long-term results of the Emancipation Proclamation, one realizes why the Constitution gave such powers to the President. The powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief, his power to make recess appointments, etc., were a considered decision of our Founding Fathers. They believed in the depravity of humans and realized that if the three branches of government were to have some real ability to guide the nation, then each one of them had to have some real power available to them as well as some real checks.
In the case of the President, the powers of Commander-in-Chief and of recess appointments are meant to give him some real power to bring to the table when he/she works with the two other branches of government. Given the current Congressional climate, it appears that only Presidency and the Judiciary are currently able to make governing decisions on a regular and stable basis.
Can you imagine what would have happened if the freedom of the slaves, if the civil rights decisions of the 1950’s and 1960’s had been left to the Congress alone? I strongly suspect that slavery would have lasted longer and that there would still be remnants of segregation still existing in various of the states. No, there was a reason why the Founding Fathers gave such strong powers to each branch of government.
None of the three branches can govern the country by itself. But, in the case of situations like the dysfunctional Congress of today, two of the three branches can at least exercise their power to keep various parts of the government functioning, even if not all of the government. In some cases, each branch has the limited authority, in certain limited areas, to set the course of the government by itself, though this is not the preferred way of functioning.
Sadly, today’s events at Congress show the one situation that the Founding Fathers did not anticipate. They did not foresee one of the branches of government falling into such dysfunction that the very future of the country is endangered. It is too bad that they did not write into the Constitution a way to have two of the three branches of government overrule a third one when that third one ceases to function in any effective way. We could have really used that possibility these last few years.
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