USA Today

The first 'imperial president'; No, George W. Bush doesn't deserve that honor. The way President Jackson wielded power earned him the nickname 'King Andrew.'

Carl Byker

January 2, 2008

Secret prisons, warrantless wiretapping, sweeping claims of executive privilege. They have all been features of the Bush administration, and they are also hallmarks of what some call an "imperial presidency." The debate over just what powers a president can legitimately use has become so heated recently that some of the leading Democrats running for president have signed a pledge that they will not claim the same powers as President Bush if they are elected to replace him.

But George W. Bush is not the first chief executive accused of being an "imperial president." That's a distinction that belongs to our seventh president, Andrew Jackson -- and how Jackson acquired the power that led his enemies to label him "King Andrew I" has enormous relevance to the modern presidency.

Today, most of us take it for granted that the president is not only the dominant figure in our government but also "the most powerful man in the world." So it might come as a shock that a strong president was decidedly not what the Founding Fathers had in mind.

According to Robert Remini, official historian of the House of Representatives, "Going back to the Founders, James Madison once told Thomas Jefferson that they didn't have to worry about the 'executive branch' because that was the weaker branch. The Founders expected the legislature to be the centerpiece of government."

In the Founders' eyes, it was the job of the president to "execute" what Congress decided. And throughout the terms of our first six presidents, that's pretty much how things worked.

Then Jackson was elected. While in the Army, Maj. Gen. Jackson had put New Orleans under martial law and invaded Florida without authorization. So, as historian Sean Wilentz of Princeton says, "Jackson was the same kind of president that he was a general. He had a vision of the presidency that no previous president could have thought of, let alone executed."

Stacked the deck

Jackson argued that only the president represented all the people; that it was he, not Congress, who should set the agenda for the country -- and to do that, he needed to control the government. To get it, he did something unprecedented: firing dozens of high-ranking government employees appointed by his predecessors -- including 13 district attorneys -- and replacing them with hard-core Jackson supporters.

Next, Jackson re-invented one of the few powers that the Constitution gives the president for interfering in the business of Congress: the veto. Jackson's predecessors had been extremely reluctant to confront Congress and rarely employed the veto. But Jackson viewed it as a political weapon that he could use to bend Congress to his will, and he went on to veto more bills than all of his predecessors combined.

But the most important step Jackson took to increase the power of the president is one that Americans today take entirely for granted: He and his allies founded the Democratic Party. According to Remini, "When this country was first established, there was a general feeling that political parties are formed for the simple purpose of achieving selfish ends. They were groups of men coming together to satisfy their greed. And so political parties were looked upon as something we did not want in this country."

But by the 1830s, Jackson and his allies had become convinced that the only way average Americans would be able to wrest control of the country from the Washington elite was if they joined together in an organization that made them far stronger collectively than they could ever be as individuals. And so they founded what was originally called not the "Democratic Party," but simply "The Democracy."

Yet, in one of the great ironies in U.S. history, the one who gained the most power from the founding of "The Democracy" was not the average voter, but the head of the party: President Andrew Jackson. As historian John Larson of Purdue University puts it, "Jackson helped create an extraconstitutional system -- a system not called for in the Constitution -- that concentrates power in the presidency, not because of his role in government, but because the president is the head of the party, and the party is the machine that helps people get elected."

Political party chief

Think about it. Some of the president's power comes from being the head of the executive branch, of course, but a surprising amount of it comes from being the head of a political party. Why? Because Congress, the supposedly independent branch of government to which the Founders gave the job of checking the president's power, is -- against the Founders' wishes -- filled with members of the president's party. And if they challenge or in any other way weaken the head of their party, they make it far harder for themselves to get re-elected. And so Congress not only doesn't function as the lead branch of government, as the Founders intended, it more often than not fails as an effective check on the president's power.

Jackson was the first president who argued that he answered not to the other branches of the government, but to the American people. But as historian Harry Watson of the University of North Carolina says, "Putting all this emphasis on the people actually empowered one man, the president of the United States, to call the shots for the whole government. And as a result, the office of the president is strengthened enormously by somebody who said, I only want to do the will of the people."

So this primary season, as both parties choose new nominees for president, and you hear the candidates making passionate speeches about the genius and wisdom of the American people, keep in mind that even the candidate who sounds most convincing could wind up being an "imperial president."

Carl Byker is the producer of the PBS documentary Andrew Jackson: Good, Evil and the Presidency, which debuts on public television stations nationwide tonight.