Tenure reform and presidential power: The single, six-year term proposal"

Abstract

During the twentieth century, a series of rapid changes transformed the office of the presidency, affecting not only its raw power and influence upon other political institutions but also, crucially for an office defined as much by image as by constitutional authority, its status in the eyes of the American public and news media. From the turn-of-the-century administration of Theodore Roosevelt to the Lyndon Johnson presidency in the 1960s, George Reedy notes, “commitment to the presidential concept” by politicians, voters and the news media became so pronounced that Americans were "virtually incapable of thinking of the United States in other terms."1 Progressives frequently encouraged the trend toward greater presidential influence as a useful means of bypassing entrenched conservatism in national and state legislatures but many on the political right were disturbed by the expansion of executive power, viewing it as both cause and consequence of liberal interventionism and as a threat to the equilibrium of constitutional government.