


Imagine a populist president who set out to create, “in the first weeks of his administration, a radically different perception of the presidency.” He could use “far-reaching executive orders” to “give various constituencies throughout the country the immediate conviction that this president, for a change, looks out for them.” The burst of presidential edicts would serve visceral as much as practical purposes: “The nation as a whole needs to be jarred by this newcomer’s determination to protect the country’s vital interests, perhaps by ordering, on national security grounds, the immediate expulsion of dangerous aliens.”
This passage wasn’t written ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration, but George H.W. Bush’s. “The Imperial Congress,” a book of essays published by the Heritage Foundation and the Claremont Institute in 1988, is a snapshot of conservative frustration as Ronald Reagan’s presidency wound down. Unlike Heritage’s “Project 2025,” the document did not offer a comprehensive policy agenda or become a campaign flash point. It argued narrowly that Congress was too strong and the presidency too weak, triggering a “crisis in the separation of powers.” The solution, as editor Gordon S. Jones put it, was “to wield the weapon of a reinvigorated executive.”
Whatever its constitutional merits, the argument had a partisan logic. Reagan’s 1984 win was a landslide. At the end of his presidency, Republicans had held the White House for 16 of the past 20 years and were about to hold it for four more. Yet GOP presidents were often thwarted by partisan opposition in Congress. In particular, Democrats had what seemed like a permanent majority in the House of Representatives, which they had controlled consecutively since the 1950s. That historic run wouldn’t end until the 1994 Republican revolution, led by Newt Gingrich — who wrote the foreword to “The Imperial Congress.”
The book helps elucidate the origins of the aggressive presidentialism the Trump administration is embracing and carrying out. But it also poses a puzzle, because that agenda was formed in response to 20th-century conditions — that is, liberal dominance of Congress and the courts — that have substantially faded away.
The parallels between 1980s conservative imagination and 2020s reality are uncanny. The same essay quoted above touts the importance of “a well-exercised firing power which keeps the entire executive branch on guard, either eager to please the White House or fearful of angering it.” (The author is a pseudonymous “long-time legislative and executive branch official.”) The recommendations at the end of the book go further by suggesting that the president “assert control over the independent agencies by firing all commissioners.”
The executive is also urged to “ignore, or challenge directly,” congressional “micromanagement” and to play hardball with the Senate on appointments. Another topical recommendation says the president should “seek repeal of the constitutional amendment limiting a president to two terms.”
The president is encouraged to brawl with the judiciary, as well — to “find many occasions to demonstrate, publicly, his disagreement with [Supreme] Court decisions” and defend executive privilege “with all his powers, even against adverse court decisions.” One essay by political scientist Thomas G. West asks rhetorically why a president should allow the media “special access inside the White House,” and the recommendations section urges him to “create and legitimize new centers of authority and information.”
Trump’s presidential blitz is finally putting into practice the wishes of some conservative intellectuals in the Reagan-Bush era who saw aggressive uses of executive power as the only way to advance GOP priorities. Another contribution to the genre was titled “The Fettered Presidency” and published by the American Enterprise Institute in 1989. The introduction, by L. Gordon Crovitz of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and Jeremy A. Rabkin of Cornell University, argued that presidential powers “must be used with greater vigor and resolve if the presidency is to fulfill its intended role.”
Now those powers are being wielded to their maximum, but in a very different context. Unlike in the 1980s, conservatives today have a strong power base in the other branches: The House of Representatives has been controlled by Republicans about two-thirds of the time in the 21st century, and GOP presidents have appointed two-thirds of the justices on the Supreme Court.
As Rabkin, now at George Mason University, told me in an email: “Then, a confident Democratic Congress was trying to micromanage a Republican president, even in foreign policy. Now, of course, a Republican majority in Congress does not want to challenge a Republican president and it has such slim margins that it can’t dare anything controversial (as trying to restrain Trump would be).”
“The Fettered Presidency” acknowledged that arguments about the balance of power between the branches can merge easily with partisanship. In the Reagan-Bush era, the introduction observed, Republican complaints about an overbearing Congress “might be interpreted as the cries of one set of partisans against the institutional leverage of their partisan opponents.” But Trump’s opponents today have relatively little leverage. Presidential power is swelling under Trump not because the opposition is strong but because it is weak.
One contributor to “The Fettered Presidency” suggested that conflict between the legislative and executive branches could ease if partisan control turned over more frequently. He called for “more Republican Houses” and “more Democrats winning the presidency.” That way, the parties “would have lived in each other’s shoes, would have had the responsibilities of being in each of the branches and controlling them.”
In the intervening 36 years, that is precisely what happened. The GOP lost its post-Nixon presidential advantage as the office flipped back and forth between the parties from the 1990s onward — Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump. Democrats’ New Deal coalition in Congress evaporated, and presidents of both parties have tended to quickly lose their congressional majorities.
But this turnover has not resulted in a stable balance between the branches. Instead, presidents of both parties have responded to the partisan oscillation by growing more assertive, and members of the president’s party in Congress have generally acquiesced. Trump’s second term is the culmination.
To which some conservatives might reply: That’s how it should be. As Jones, the “The Imperial Congress” editor, wrote: “President Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana Territories; during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus and freed the slaves; President Franklin D. Roosevelt sold ships to Great Britain before Congress declared war. Their power to do any of these things was suspect, but their actions were supported by substantial majorities of the citizens, and the actions stood.”
Some of Trump’s unilateral actions will stand as well. But this isn’t the 1980s anymore; presidential power is no longer a stand-in for Republican power, and conservatives have no reason to think they have a lasting advantage in presidential politics. The prerogatives Trump is unlocking can be used just as ferociously against their interests in the future. Which, of course, is the impulse behind modern presidentialism — to get your way before the opposition can get theirs.
Jason Willick is a Washington Post columnist focusing on law, politics and foreign policy.