President Biden has portrayed the passage of the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure legislation as vindicating his vision of the presidency. At the signing ceremony, Biden touted the law as answering the question, “How can we come together to be president for all Americans, to make sure our democracy delivers for you, for all of you?”
Biden often emphasizes this view of the presidency, purposefully seeking to distinguish himself from his immediate predecessor. “It’s the one office in this nation that represents everyone,” Biden said the day after the 2020 election. Donald Trump, by contrast, downplayed the importance of reaching out to a national constituency, saying instead, “I think my base is so strong, I’m not sure that I have to do that.”
Trump’s view of the presidency is not unusual. Scholars often think of presidents as partisans. The need to win the electoral college incentivizes presidents, as they govern, to prioritize satisfying citizens in the most electorally competitive states and in those states that make up their party base.
But the idea that the president represents the nation as a whole helped transform our constitutional system into a more presidency-centered government. It set the terms by which Congress expected the modern presidency to operate.
Congress played a key role in transforming the presidency
The president was not always presumed to be the nation’s leading policymaker. But in the first half of the 20th century, Congress and several presidents enacted laws that had the effect of creating a new, “institutional” presidency.
These statutes gave the president formal policymaking roles and more resources to manage the executive branch. In each case, legislators assumed that the president, elected by the whole people, was the unique representative of the national interest. By contrast, members of Congress saw themselves as too beholden to their individual districts or states while viewing bureaucrats as too captive to their agencies.
For example, the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 required the president to submit an annual budget to Congress and created the Bureau of the Budget to ensure that proposal would reflect the president’s views. The Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934 allowed the president to enter into bilateral trade agreements without securing Congress’s consent. The Reorganization Act of 1939 empowered the president to reorganize the executive branch unless Congress exercised a legislative veto to reject those plans; that authority was soon used to establish the Executive Office of the President. And the Employment Act of 1946 required the president to submit an annual economic report to Congress and created the Council of Economic Advisers.
These and other acts institutionalized presidential leadership, setting a clear expectation that all presidents would develop a legislative agenda and would guide Congress to achieving nationally oriented outcomes. Today that expectation is so ingrained in Americans’ views that we hardly recognize what the presidency was like before.
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Congress fought back in the 1970s
The legitimacy of this shift toward presidential government rested on citizens’ and legislators’ faith that presidents would act in the national interest. When the Vietnam War debacle and Watergate scandal raised doubts about that assumption, the earlier reforms that had relied on that idea were called into question.
Congress responded with new laws. The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 created a separate congressional budget process and established the Congressional Budget Office, with the goal of diluting the president’s budget agenda-setting authority. The Trade Act of 1974 required congressional assent for presidential trade agreements under a new fast-track procedure.
In the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978, Congress looked more to the Federal Reserve Board to achieve its preferred economic goals. In 1983, the Supreme Court declared in INS v. Chadha that the veto Congress had given itself over the president’s reorganization plans was unconstitutional; in response, legislators did away with the president’s authority to reorganize the executive branch.
None of this dislodged the presidency from its place at the center of U.S. government. But it did rob the modern presidency of its rationale of providing unique national representation. It became possible for a president like Trump to choose to dispense altogether with the pretense of representing all Americans.
Biden is attempting a restoration
As Biden sees it, the fact that Trump dismissed the idea that the president represents the nation as a whole has given him an opportunity to recapture it. Presidents have long benefited politically from their ability to repudiate an unpopular predecessor. With his infrastructure legislation, Biden has sought to realize this principle while addressing a critical national need, much as Dwight D. Eisenhower did in spearheading Congress’s establishment of the interstate highway system.
Still, an individual president can only do so much. Biden is invoking an idea that has been on the wane since the beginning of his career as a senator. Appealing to unity only works if there’s some political reality behind the assumption of a national consensus. When Congress passed responsibility to the presidency in the first half of the 20th century, legislators shared some sense of the national interest across several policy domains.
That is hard to find in debates today. Even in the infrastructure legislation, Republicans who crossed party lines to support the bill are sharply criticized by fellow lawmakers and even threatened by ordinary citizens. Nor can the bill’s passage mask the reality that a significant portion of one party refuses even to acknowledge that the president was legitimately elected.
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Is Biden right to bet that Americans will again believe that U.S. presidents can and should strive to represent everyone — or to hope that Americans across party lines will believe he’s meeting that standard? Our history suggests that any presidential claims to represent the national interest depend on whether other political figures and ordinary Americans believe it.
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John A. Dearborn (@johnadearborn) is assistant professor of political science at Vanderbilt University and the author of “Power Shifts: Congress and Presidential Representation” (University of Chicago Press, 2021).