Presidential Powers

What power does the President of the United States of America actually possess? The UnitedStates invests fantastic powers in its chief executive:

• He appoints justices to the Supreme Court. These are the folk who creatively interpret domestic limits on things like abortion, cryptography, genetic manipulation, internet censorship, and civil rights. And their appointments last a lifetime. And several are pending right now. These Appointments must still be confirmed by the Senate.

• He appoints the Fed Chairman, subject to confirmation by the Senate. The Federal Reserve can trigger recessions or depressions, although it presently prefers to merely throttle a boom. Still, Alan Greenspan is not getting any younger.

• He appoints the entire cabinet - all the secretaries of things like energy, agriculture, and so on, and they are entirely responsible to him. All such appointments are subject to senate confirmation.

• He controls the federal police and military forces, especially including the FBI and National Guard, but not the state and local police.

• He issues executive orders, which substantially affect how the business of the government is done, and how entities interacting with the government have to behave. These cannot override legislation, but greatly influence how legislation is actually translated into action. However, see Executive Order 12923 [1], which overrides the expiration date of a law on the grounds that its expiration presents a `national emergency'.

• He has the power to call a press conference at any time, to disseminate any message to the entire country (if not the entire planet), for any reason. This ability for the president to steer public opinion and thereby the general domestic agenda is probably his most significant domestic power.

• He has veto power. This is to say he can take any bill that passes a simple majority of the House of Representatives and of the Senate, and refuse to make it law.

This last power can be overridden by a two thirds vote of both houses of congress, but that usually requires the president's own party to vote to override, which as you may imagine doesn't happen much. Make no mistake, the US president is emphatically the most powerful person in domestic US politics. Except, of course, for the unelected officials.

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He has virtually unlimited foreign policy powers, including the ability to wage undeclared war on whatever scale against whatever opponent he chooses at any time. For example:

• Thomas Jefferson vs. Libya (1803)
• James Polk vs. Mexico (1846, which became a declared war) http://www.pbs.org/kera/usmexicanwar
• most of the Native American wars of the 1800s. http://www.ngeorgia.com/history/nghisttt.html
• Grenada
• Panama
• Yugoslavia
• Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower vs. NorthKorea and China (1950-1953)
• Dwight Eisenhower, JohnFitzgeraldKennedy?, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon vs. NorthVietnam?, Laos, and Cambodia (195? - 1973)
• many other wars during the 1900s.

Congress can refuse to fund the war, if the war is large enough (more than a few thousand troops, or a few hundred million dollars per year) that it cannot be hidden in the BlackBudget? of the intelligence agencies. Congress can theoretically end an undeclared war 60 days after U.S. troops have started fighting. For obvious reasons, these limitations are hard to enforce, as shown during Vietnam, the Iran-Contra affair, and the GulfWar.

Weirdly enough, the president's power to make treaties (including peace treaties) is more-or-less completely hamstrung by requiring senate ratification. So-called "fast track negotiation authority" has been consistently denied to the president.