1994 has not been a good year to be President of the United States. 1995 promises to be worse. For the first two years of his term in office, William Clinton, the American nation's 42nd President, had the task of working with a Congress the majority of whom were members of his own Democratic Party. Effective in January of 1995, per the elections of this past November 8th, President Bill Clinton will face a Congress with Republican Party majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. At all times tension between the Executive and Legislative branches of government have caused presidential successes (on domestic policy at least) to be the exception rather than the rule. The situation as it now stands holds the dangerous potential of bringing presidential-congressional relations to a standstill. While the current dilemma is exacerbated by the recent elections, the problem has been developing for several decades.
Constitutionally speaking, presidential powers have been ill-defined from the beginning. "The executive power shall be vested in the president of the United States of America" is the ambiguous definition the U.S. Constitution gave the office (Lineberry, Edwards & Wattenberg, 1993, p. 291). Alexander Hamilton, in "The Federalist Papers, No. 69," attempted to reassure potential supporters of the Constitution that the president would not be a despot, indeed, "it would be difficult to determine whether that magistrate would, in the aggregate, possess more or less power than the governor of New York" (p. 55). Nevertheless, the presidency did accrue more powers than anticipated, largely for two reasons: the general expansion of federal government powers over states' rights, and the personal expansion of the office's power by individual presidents of strong will and/or political acumen (Barber, 1990, pp. 341-342). Abraham Lincoln's declaration of war on the southern states is an example of both forces in ac...