Presidents are usually seeking power when they rely on unitary executive orders, executive agreements, proclamations, and national security directives in lieu of legislation and treaties; when they build and rebuild the administrative apparatus that surrounds them; when they emphasize loyalty in appointing individuals to positions in the federal bureaucracy; when they engage directly with the public; and when they invoke the unitary theory of the executive to justify their actions.*

None of this maneuvering, however, implies that presidents exercise all the power they would like. Ample scholarship emphasizes the historical contingencies and institutional constraints that limit a president’s ability to exercise unilateral powers, centralize authority, politicize the appointments process, issue public appeals, or refashion the political universe.

Presidents begin their terms with high-minded goals, policy to-do lists, and outlines for programs they have dreamed about implementing for years. These goals, lists, and outlines, however, are routinely stymied by domestic political forces at home and abroad. Their policy initiatives collapse on the long and laborious road to legislative acceptance; their appeals to the public fall on deaf ears; their efforts to project power abroad fail to convince foreign states to ally themselves with the United States or foreign foes to stand down.

In a study of the contemporary presidency from 2000, Gary Andres, Patrick Griffin, and James Thurber write, “Instead of trying to predict what the next president can accomplish in the first hundred days, we should ask if he will be able to get anything done at all. Given the built-in checks on both the president and Congress, a president who succeeds with even small agenda items in Congress deserves more plaudits and accolades than are currently afforded by the press, pundits, and scholars.”²³

Even when their party controls Congress, in what is called unified government, presidents still struggle to advance portions of their policy agendas. Reflecting back on his presidency, Jimmy Carter sheepishly admitted, “Maybe I was overly confident when I was inaugurated about what I could do.” Carter found himself at odds not only with congressional Republicans but also with various segments of his own Democratic party. “I couldn’t get a single Democrat to sponsor my legislation that I wanted for reorganizing the government,” he recalled.²⁴ When that challenge passed, Carter promptly confronted another legislative failure and then another, on environmental policy, energy policy, health policy, and on and on.**

Like Carter, Donald Trump also ran headlong into institutional constraints and divisions that persist during periods of unified government. After assuming office with a Republican majority in both the House and Senate, Trump set to work on fulfilling his campaign promise to repeal and replace Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement, the Affordable Care Act.²⁵ Rushed from the start, however, the effort first hit speed bumps and then drove straight into a ditch. The Trump administration spent only sixty-three days working on their first legislative proposal, the American Health Care Act (AHCA), and devoted less than three weeks to debating the actual text.²⁶ The Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the bill projected that 14 million people would lose their health insurance in its first year, with 24 million losing coverage over time.²⁷ The bill cut Medicaid funding, eliminated the controversial individual mandate of the ACA, and slashed means-tested insurance subsidies. Still, some members of the Republican House Freedom Caucus, including Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, criticized the bill for its subsidies, labeling it “Obamacare Lite.” Other Republicans chafed at the prospect of cutting Medicaid benefits for their poorer constituents. Lacking the votes to pass the bill in the House, the first attempt at “repeal and replace” was pulled. President Trump blamed the failure on a lack of bipartisan support from House Democrats, and noted that “we’ll end up with a truly great health care bill in the future after this mess known as Obamacare explodes.”²⁸ Republicans were not ready to throw in the towel, however. In May, they returned to the task by attending to concerns raised by their most conservative members. In so doing, they managed to pass a bill before the Congressional Budget Office could even evaluate the proposal or formal hearings be held.²⁹ Momentum, however, proved short-lived, as attention shifted to the Senate. There, Democrats stood steadfastly against any change while moderate Republicans insisted that the House version was all but dead on arrival. Patient advocate groups and health care providers spoke out against this bill, and the public showed little appetite for curtailing insurance coverage. All told, divisions within the majority party, the active involvement of powerful interest groups, and a highly decentralized legislative process characterized by multiple veto points made systemic policy change remarkably difficult, even during a period of Republican ascendance to heights not seen since Hoover’s presidency. 

Some impediments to presidential action come from within governments; others arise from outside. Indeed, as Carter would learn with the Iranian hostage crisis (1979–1981), and Trump would learn with an increasingly belligerent North Korea, international events can do their part to unravel not just a presidential agenda but an entire presidency. Natural disasters, droughts and floods, oil spills, invasions and takeovers, the collapse of nations, embargoes, and scandals may also redirect or derail executive planning, interfering with a president’s ability to get other things—and sometimes anything—done.

Lincoln once remarked, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”³⁰ For Lincoln, it was civil war that consumed his presidency. More recently, presidents have needed to manage persistent unrest in the Middle East and sudden economic free-falls, school shootings and urban protests. Presidents have plenty of political reasons to appear in command. As a practical matter, however, they spend a good portion of their time in office merely treading turbulent waters.

Constraints on presidential power are particularly evident during those rare occasions when presidents champion comprehensive policy reforms. Fresh off reelection in 2004, George W. Bush famously quipped that he intended to spend liberally the political capital that voters had plainly invested in him. Bush forthrightly proceeded to marshal his available resources to restructure Social Security through privatization, but he failed so completely that Congress never voted on a single element of his second-term legislative master plan.

For his part, Obama suffered a similarly trying fate at the hands of congressional Republicans. During the final six years of his presidency, a period of divided government in which the Republicans controlled a majority of at least one chamber of Congress, a bare majority of House Republicans managed to delay, derail, or block the president’s efforts to enact gun control legislation, immigration reform, a jobs bill, and all manner of appointments. “For the second time in two weeks, every single Republican in the United States Senate has chosen to obstruct a bill that would create jobs and get our economy going again,” Obama despaired after another disastrous vote, in 2011, on his jobs bill.³¹ (Nothing compares, however, with the partisan politics evinced during the implementation phases of Obama’s signature domestic policy reform, the Affordable Care Act, which we discuss at greater length in Chapter 12.)

While campaigning and fundraising on behalf of Democratic congressional candidates for the 2014 midterm elections, Obama mused, “Realistically, I’d get a whole lot more done if Nancy Pelosi [were] Speaker of the House.”³² Earlier, Pelosi (D-CA) had joined in, claiming, “The president has tried to cooperate with the Republican majority led by Speaker Boehner (R-OH); they really have not cooperated with him. That obstruction has really been their philosophy.”³³ Beyond a philosophy, obstruction was the Republican strategy. By demonstrating a steadfast and unified commitment to it, House Republicans managed to effectively close the legislative process to any significant policy change supported by the president during his second term of office.

In the case of Donald Trump, what constraints on presidential power is he likely to encounter?