President Andrew Jackson is supposed to have said that, objecting to Justice John Marshall’s ruling in the case of Worcester v. Georgia granting legal rights to Native American tribes. Whether Jackson actually used those words is debatable, but the remark has stood for nearly two centuries as an icon of executive resistance not only to judicial orders but to just about any form of government action a powerful executive doesn’t like.
Worcester was a federal decision, but it serves to symbolize the tension over executive power that has prevailed ever since at all levels of American government, state and local as well as federal. The arguments over President Donald Trump’s executive orders may be something new, but they have relatives in the complicated history of American democratic debate.
Just about a century before Donald Trump, there was Huey Long in Louisiana. Long was as close to a dictator as any American governor has ever been. He decreed policies and issued orders to legislators, backed by intimidation if they balked. He fired his legally elected lieutenant governor. Later, as a U.S. senator, he continued to run his state as an autocrat, emasculating local government and taking personal control of appointments to schools, police and fire departments. Is Donald Trump another Huey Long? I don’t think we can say that at this point.
Well, then, is Trump another Robert Moses, New York’s imperious master builder over a career that lasted 40 years? The record invites comparison, but we’re talking about two very different brands of autocracy. Moses forced massive highways on communities that didn’t want them, built huge housing projects essentially on his whims, and ridiculed anyone who dared to criticize his plans. He rarely asked any legislative body for permission; he didn’t need to. The lenient terms of his many bureaucratic appointments and the receipts from his roads and bridges gave him the power to start digging and blasting just about any place he wished. Is Trump another Robert Moses? Whatever you may think of Trump, that would be difficult to bring off.
Then there were the state and local leaders who acquired dictatorial reputations that didn’t always match perfectly with the facts. Richard J. Daley was seen by many as a feudal boss during his two decades as mayor of Chicago, and to some extent that was true. He used a tightly run political machine to turn the City Council into a rubber stamp and fired city employees who didn’t measure up to his demands. When an alderman rose in council to challenge him, he sometimes turned off the man’s microphone. But was his power unlimited? Political scientists who have studied the Daley regime tend not to think so. Daley could boss his aldermen around, but most of his major moves had to be cleared with other power centers in town — the big corporations, the Catholic Church and the labor unions that had a say in almost everything.
Ronald Reagan was seen as a dictator by his critics during his years as governor of California, in large part due to the menacing things he said about rebellious youths and campus protests. But Reagan’s bark was always considerably worse than his bite: He listened to the Legislature and allowed it to send him liberal laws as well as conservative ones, notably a bill relaxing the rules governing abortion.
George C. Wallace became a national symbol for gubernatorial autocracy in 1963 when he stood in the “schoolhouse door” to block two Black students from entering the University of Alabama. But Wallace was just putting on a show to enhance his political standing at home. When the federal government moved to stop him, he backed down.
If we’re seeking more recent examples of Trump-like executive overreach, we might look into the career of Scott Walker, the Republican who served as governor of Wisconsin for two contentious terms before voters turned him out in 2018. Shortly after taking office, Walker pushed through a budget that reduced the pay of state workers by nearly 10 percent, eliminated collective bargaining for most public employees, and forced unions to hold repeated elections to continue representing the workforce. Walker presented his plan as an austerity budget, but it was difficult to see it as anything more than an anti-labor vendetta. He survived a Democratic legislative boycott and an attempt to recall him from office before he was beaten in 2018.
I COULD POINT TO MANY MORE CASES, but I think these are enough to demonstrate that executive excess — and angry allegations of it — have been part of American government at all levels ever since the nation was founded.
Much of the excess and the resentment has occurred in state and local politics, but it’s worth stopping for a moment to recall some of the cases that have bedeviled the federal system.
There are more of them than I have space to mention, and they involve some of our most honorable chief executives. Thomas Jefferson spent $15 million on the Louisiana Purchase without obtaining legal authority from Congress. Within vivid recent memory, Barack Obama chose to invoke a path to residency for undocumented immigrants even after Congress had rejected a bill to provide for it. And on the somewhat less honorable side, President Richard Nixon flatly refused to spend money Congress had appropriated, leading to the 1974 Impoundment Control Act that made such intransigence illegal.
Some of the most dramatic instances of executive overreach amount to less than we have imagined them to be. Andrew Jackson vowed not to enforce the Supreme Court’s Indian rights decision in the Worcester case, but in fact the chief justice was just making a statement; there was nothing to enforce. Franklin Roosevelt was denounced by his critics as a dictator for attempting to pack the Supreme Court with friendly justices, but the scheme got nowhere. Congress refused to consider it.
AND THAT POINTS UP one of the most significant pieces of reality about the long history of executive overreach. Most of the autocrats who overstepped executive authority haven’t simply ignored legislative bodies; they have sought buy-in, even if that involved a certain amount of bullying or intimidation. Huey Long did manhandle the Louisiana Legislature, but for the most part he persuaded it to vote for the schemes he proposed. Richard J. Daley effectively converted the Chicago City Council into a rubber stamp, but — a few dead microphones notwithstanding — he observed the standard forms of parliamentary procedure. Scott Walker forced through a large package of anti-labor plans, but he went to considerable trouble to get legislative majorities to endorse them.
Is Donald Trump essentially doing what his autocratic forebears have done, or is he trying something even more dangerous? You can look at that question in a couple of different ways.
On the one hand, Congress has made no effort so far to stop Trump from doing anything. So perhaps that is acquiescence of a sort. On the other hand, the president has not sought congressional approval for his most brazen acts — firing federal employees on a whim, dismantling entire federal agencies, moving to stop New York City’s locally imposed congestion pricing program, vowing to end the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship. In doing those things without legislative approval, the president took a step beyond the machinations of even the most aggressive autocrats at all levels of American government.
One last thing needs to be said: The most brazen executive autocrats are eventually stopped. The one thing we don’t know is just when “eventually” is going to be in the present case.
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
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