Does the [US] President Matter as Much as You Think?

Does the President Matter as Much as You Think? (Ep. 404) - Freakonomics Freakonomics

"DUBNER: So most economic measures in the U.S. at the moment are strong, very strong, especially the stock markets. Labor markets are relatively strong, with slightly higher wage growth. And we’re about to enter the meat of a new presidential campaign, with obviously Trump as the incumbent. How much credit, not will, but should, Trump claim for this state of the economy?

HUBBARD: Well, I think President Trump can rightly claim some credit. When the beginning of his presidency happened, there was a shift in business people’s expectations about what was possible. There was a sense in which regulation and tax policy were going to become more favorable. Having said that, a lot of factors underlying economic growth happen whoever the president is...

While the president has the power to nominate federal judges, they must be confirmed by the Senate. That used to require a supermajority — at least 60 of the 100 votes in the Senate. But in 2013, that changed. Barack Obama’s judicial nominees were facing Republican pushback; the Democrats had control of the Senate but not enough to muster a supermajority. So Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid used what had come to be known as the nuclear option.

Harry REID: It’s time to change the Senate before this institution becomes obsolete.

The nuclear option got rid of the rule requiring a supermajority. Now only a simple majority would be required to confirm all federal judicial nominees except for the Supreme Court. Mitch McConnell, who was then the Senate minority leader, here’s what he said at the time:

Mitch MCCONNELL: I say to my friends on the other side of the aisle: you will regret this. And you may regret it a lot sooner than you think.

Indeed, in the next election cycle, the Republicans took control of the Senate; and then in 2016 when the Republican Donald Trump was elected president, he had the power to confirm judges with a simple majority. And he has been using that power...

MEYLER: One thing that [Obama] said with respect to the Affordable Care Act is that it established a baseline. And I think his view was that you couldn’t go back from that baseline. I think that was the motivation behind presenting something like DACA or entering into the Paris agreement. I think his view was that these baselines would be very hard to dial back. It hasn’t really proved as hard as I think he imagined. I definitely think it has increased the extent to which Trump could claim some form of bipartisan legitimacy for his action, that he can claim that he’s just acting as a Democratic president would.And I think that’s particularly the case with something like DACA where he can say, “Well, I don’t think it was constitutional in the first place, so I’m going to get rid of it. And I’m not exercising extra discretion. It’s just what Obama had done previously.”...

DUBNER: I’d like you to compare President Trump’s declarations of intent, whether they were things he said during the campaign or during his time in office, with his actual accomplishments.

MEYLER: I think he’s generally tried to do the things that he claimed he would do. He’s definitely made immigration a big hinge of his presidency, as he had said he would. I think he’s lived up to promises to the coal plants and various other energy-industry constituencies to dial back environmental regulation. And then also on the tax front, he managed to undermine the Affordable Care Act through the law that was passed to get rid of basically the tax that would have supported the Affordable Care Act.

DUBNER: And how typical would you say that is for recent presidents? Again, the gap between declarations of intent and accomplishments.

MEYLER: I would say he’s been average. I don’t feel that he’s been extraordinarily effective. He had touted passing a lot of laws early in his presidency. But the Pew Foundation did a study and showed that while the number of laws were, say, greater than the prior Congress, a lot of those laws were symbolic and there weren’t that many major legislative accomplishments...

I love this metaphor of the bully pulpit as applied to Trump, I would not have thought of that. But I — yes, I completely agree. He has put the bully back in bully pulpit. My feeling is that there could be a positive dimension to reinvigorating the symbolic and the rhetorical power of the presidency. Now, I mean, I really dislike everything that Trump does and all of his tweets and excess. But the way that he’s managed to actually use social media to galvanize people and to try to unify his base around an agenda, I think is instructive for other potential leaders.I think one problem with President Obama’s strategy was that he didn’t really appeal enough to people and to people’s ordinary moral intuitions in order to get them to support his agenda. I think people felt that his presidency was too bureaucratic or too technocratic so that he wasn’t really taking advantage of the possibility of galvanizing a public.

Just for the historical record, I want to clarify something here. It was President Teddy Roosevelt who coined the phrase “bully pulpit” as a description of the Presidency. And Roosevelt took great delight in using the bully pulpit. But back then, the word “bully” had an additional usage — as an adjective that meant “good” or even “great.” That’s what Roosevelt meant by calling the presidency a “bully pulpit” — that it was a great platform to get things done. Not that you could use the presidency to bully people into submission...

DUBNER: So of the three branches of government, which would you argue has gained the most power and lost the most power over the past, let’s say, two decades?

MEYLER: I think that the judiciary has gained the most power... with the impasse in the legislative branch, almost all questions of significance are getting decided by the judiciary. And it means that Congress lacks the ability to really override judicial decisions because they just can’t agree on enough...

DUBNER: So here are a couple sentences that you wrote not long ago. “It is critical to distinguish Trump’s bark from his bite. He has disparaged judges, called the media ‘the enemy of the people,’ praised torture, and compared the intelligence community to Nazis. But he has not followed up on these statements,” you write. “Unlike Franklin D. Roosevelt, he hasn’t tried to pack the Supreme Court. Not that Trump needs to,” you added. “Unlike Barack Obama,” you wrote, “he hasn’t (yet) targeted journalists in leak investigations.” “Unlike George W. Bush,” you wrote, “he hasn’t actually taken a page from the Nazis by ordering the intelligence community to use coercive interrogation.” So again, thinking in terms of leverage or how much the president matters, it sounds like you’re describing someone that’s positioning themselves as an attack dog, but is actually a watchdog, if not a lapdog...

POSNER: The presidents we like often are the really powerful ones who break the rules, because those rules are out of date and old-fashioned and reflect values that we no longer agree with."


If the President doesn't influence the economy much, we can't thank Obama for economic growth under Trump either