The Candidate I Want
A Crisis Dispatch
What I want in a presidential candidate is a candidate who runs on restoring the power of Congress to represent the American people and who promises to faithfully execute the laws that Congress passes and to represent the country’s interests honestly before the American people and the world. I want a presidential candidate committed to moving politics back to the people.
This is not the candidate either major party is currently producing. Neither party’s primary architecture is built to surface this candidate. Both parties have spent decades selecting for the inverse — candidates who promise to deliver, who promise to act around Congress when Congress will not act, who promise to use the executive apparatus to substitute for the legislative process the Constitution placed at the center of American self-government. The selection has produced what we now have. The corrective requires a different kind of candidate, running on a different theory of the office.
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The presidency was not designed as the engine of American policy-making. The framers placed the legislative power in Congress because Congress is the institution closest to the people — 435 House members each representing roughly 770,000 constituents, 100 senators accountable to specific state electorates, deliberating in public through a procedural architecture designed to surface popular preferences and produce legislation that has survived bicameral review and majority assent. The substantive expression of popular sovereignty, as the founders understood it, is the legislation Congress passes. Not the policy preferences of the president.
The president’s constitutional role is given in Article II Section 3. The president shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed. The presidency was designed as the enforcement function for legislation that the people’s representatives in Congress had produced through deliberation. Hamilton in Federalist 70 argued for executive energy specifically in service of the execution function — the executive needed to be unitary, decisive, and accountable precisely so that the laws Congress passed would be carried out without the dispersion and delay that a multi-headed executive would produce. The energy was for execution. The substance was Congress’s.
Across the past century, this architecture has been inverted in practice. Congress has been treated as the obstacle. The president has been treated as the substance. Voters have come to expect that the president will deliver policy outcomes regardless of whether Congress has passed legislation authorizing them. Presidents have come to expect that they will be evaluated by what they did, not by what they faithfully executed. The expectations have produced the bipartisan inflation of presidential power that defines contemporary American governance — executive orders that legislate around congressional inaction, signing statements that alter the meaning of laws Congress passed, emergency declarations that substitute for legislative authority, prosecutorial discretion deployed as policy-making instrument, agency-rule-making that fills the space Congress has refused to fill.
Both parties have built the infrastructure. Both parties have run candidates promising to use it. The current authoritarian project has taken the infrastructure to its catastrophic conclusion, but the infrastructure itself is the bipartisan inheritance of decades of presidential-power inflation that neither party has been willing to dismantle when its own candidate held the office.
The candidate I want would campaign to dismantle it.
The campaign commitment is concrete. The candidate would promise to refuse executive orders that legislate around congressional inaction. Would refuse to use signing statements to alter the meaning of laws Congress passed. Would refuse to deploy emergency powers as substitute for legislative authority. Would refuse to use the appointment power to install agency heads whose project is to dismantle the statutory authority Congress granted the agencies. Would refuse to treat prosecutorial discretion as a policy-making instrument. Would refuse, in short, every operational practice that has been used across the past several decades to substitute presidential preference for legislative deliberation.
The corrective is operational, not just rhetorical. The contemporary inflation of presidential power has produced specific practices, and the restoration would have to unwind them by refusing to use them. A candidate who said I will restore congressional power without committing to the specific operational refusals would be making a slogan rather than a promise. The candidate I want would make the promise.
The candidate would also use the bully pulpit for what the bully pulpit was actually for — pressuring Congress to do the work the Constitution requires Congress to do. When Congress fails to legislate on questions the polity needs legislation on, the president’s role is to put public pressure on Congress and on the electorate to demand the legislation, not to issue executive orders that let Congress off the hook for refusing to legislate. The contemporary practice of executive substitution has been the mechanism by which Congress has been allowed to escape accountability for the substantive policy questions it was designed to resolve. The corrective requires both halves — the president refusing to substitute, and the public holding Congress accountable for the substitution refusal.
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The presidential veto, as currently practiced, has been absorbed into the inflated-presidency model. Presidents veto on the basis of I disagree with this policy, this is contrary to my party’s program, this is contrary to my mandate. The contemporary practice treats the veto as the president’s substantive policy instrument — the place where presidential preference overrides congressional deliberation. Both parties accept this. Both parties expect their presidents to veto legislation the party opposes regardless of how the legislation came together through the legislative process.
This is the same constitutional inversion the broader argument identifies, applied to the specific instrument of the veto. Article I Section 7 gives the president the qualified-negative on legislation. The qualified-negative was designed by the founders as a structural check, not as a substantive policy instrument. Hamilton in Federalist 73 makes this explicit. The veto exists to give the executive the means to defend the executive office against legislative encroachment on its constitutional functions, to defend against patently unconstitutional legislation, and to defend against legislation that has been hurriedly or factionally passed without adequate deliberation. Hamilton specifically argues the veto was not intended as a routine policy instrument and that the framers expected it to be used sparingly. The early American practice tracks this — Washington vetoed twice in two terms, both on constitutional grounds. Adams vetoed nothing. Jefferson vetoed nothing. Madison vetoed seven bills in eight years, again mostly on constitutional grounds. The expansion of the veto into a routine policy instrument is a Jacksonian innovation that has compounded across two centuries into the contemporary practice.
The veto should be as rare as impeachment.
Impeachment exists in the Constitution. It is rarely used because the threshold for legitimate use is high and because routine use would distort the institutional architecture in ways the founders specifically designed against. The veto exists in the Constitution on the same structural footing. The threshold for legitimate use should be high — constitutional defect, executive-prerogative defense, deliberative-process failure. Routine policy-disagreement veto distorts the architecture in the same way routine policy-disagreement impeachment would. Impeachment has been used four times in American history at the presidential level. The veto has been used roughly 2,600 times. The asymmetry has no constitutional warrant. The corrective is to bring the veto practice back in line with the constitutional design — toward the impeachment register rather than away from it.
The candidate I want would campaign on this directly. When Congress sends the president legislation that has come through the legislative process — that has survived bicameral review, that has been debated in public, that has produced the bipartisan or partisan coalition required to pass it — the president should sign it. Even if the president personally disagrees with the policy. Even if the president’s party opposes the policy. The president’s signature is the executive’s recognition that the legislative process has produced what the legislative process is constitutionally authorized to produce. The signature is procedural acknowledgment. It is not substantive endorsement. The president who signs legislation they personally disagree with is performing the constitutional office. The president who vetoes legislation they personally disagree with is substituting personal preference for the constitutional process.
The legitimate-veto category is narrow. Constitutional defect — legislation that violates the Bill of Rights, that establishes a religion, that suspends habeas corpus absent the constitutional conditions, that imposes bills of attainder, that violates the equal-protection guarantee. Executive-prerogative defense — legislation that encroaches on the executive’s specifically enumerated powers, such as the commander-in-chief authority or the pardon power. Deliberative-process failure — legislation that has been passed without the procedural conditions the constitutional design requires, such as appropriations passed without the originating-in-the-House requirement being honored. These are the categories the founders contemplated, the categories the early presidents used, and the categories the contemporary practice has expanded into a generalized policy-preference instrument that the constitutional design does not authorize.
The obvious counter is that Congress sometimes passes bad legislation. Yes. The corrective for bad legislation is electoral accountability — voters punishing the legislators who passed it, voters demanding repeal, voters selecting different representatives in the next cycle. The corrective is not presidential override. Presidential override displaces the electoral-accountability mechanism that the constitutional architecture depends on. If voters know the president will veto whatever bad legislation Congress passes, voters lose the incentive to hold Congress accountable. The veto-as-routine-policy-instrument is a piece of the broader pattern that has made Congress unaccountable across the past several decades. Congress has been able to pass legislation knowing it would be vetoed and to refuse to pass legislation knowing the president would issue executive orders to substitute for it. Both moves let Congress escape responsibility for the substantive policy questions it was designed to resolve.
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Faithful execution of the laws Congress passes. Veto restraint along the constitutional categories the founders contemplated. Congressional empowerment through public pressure on Congress to legislate and through public accountability for Congress when it does not. The three commitments describe a candidate who would campaign on doing less in the inflated-presidential sense and more in the constitutional-presidential sense — less unilateral policy-making, more institutional restraint; less executive-order regime, more congressional pressure; less veto-as-policy-instrument, more veto-as-constitutional-check.
The package is what moving politics back to the people actually consists of in operational terms. The American political experiment was designed around legislative deliberation as the substantive form of popular sovereignty. The 435 House members and 100 senators, each accountable to specific constituencies, deliberating in public, producing legislation through procedural architecture the founders designed — this is the institution that represents the people in the substantive sense. The president represents the people only in the diffuse national-mandate sense, and the diffuse sense has been used across the past century to override the substantive representational sense whenever the president’s preference diverges from the legislation Congress produces.
The plebiscitary model — the president as the people’s tribune, the mandate-from-the-people that overrides institutional procedure — is the form authoritarian movements have always preferred and have always built. The contemporary American authoritarian project is using the plebiscitary infrastructure that bipartisan presidential-power inflation has built. The corrective is not just to defeat the current authoritarian project at the ballot box but to dismantle the infrastructure that made the authoritarian project possible. The dismantling requires a candidate willing to refuse the inflated office that the infrastructure has constructed for the president to occupy.
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The candidate I want would also be willing to represent the country honestly before the American people and the world.
Honesty before the American people means refusing the manipulative-mandate rhetoric that contemporary candidates have used to justify the inflated office. The president does not have a personal mandate to enact a policy program. The president has a constitutional duty to execute the laws Congress passes and to defend the constitutional order. Campaigning on a policy program is appropriate to the extent that the candidate intends to advocate for the program through legitimate political-process channels — by pressuring Congress, by making the public case, by using the bully pulpit to build coalitions. Campaigning on a policy program as if the program were what the president will deliver is the rhetorical infrastructure of the inflated office. The candidate I want would refuse it.
Honesty before the world means representing the country’s actual interests and actual commitments faithfully, rather than substituting presidential preferences for the country’s constitutional positions. The president speaks for the country abroad in ways the Constitution authorizes. The authorization is conditioned on the president acting within the framework of treaties Congress has ratified, statutes Congress has passed, and the broader institutional architecture of American foreign-policy commitment. The contemporary practice of presidents conducting foreign policy unilaterally — withdrawing from treaties without congressional consultation, conducting military operations without congressional authorization, making commitments to foreign powers that exceed the president’s actual authority — is the foreign-policy version of the domestic inflation. The candidate I want would refuse it.
The country’s interests are not the president’s interests. The president represents the country in the constitutional sense — as the head of state whose role is to faithfully execute and faithfully represent the constitutional order the country has produced through its democratic processes. The candidate I want would understand the difference and would campaign on it.
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This candidate does not exist in current American politics in the form I am describing. The major-party primary architecture has been calibrated across decades to surface candidates who promise the inflated office and to filter out candidates who would refuse it. The donor networks that fund both parties have specific reasons to want the inflated office maintained — the inflated office produces predictable policy outcomes that donor preferences can shape, while the deflated office would return policy-making to congressional deliberation that donor preferences can influence but cannot reliably control. The commentariat that covers presidential politics has been built around the inflated office as the substantive subject of political reporting, and would have to reorient itself substantially to cover the deflated office. The institutional pressures all run in the wrong direction.
But the corrective is not impossible. It requires a candidate willing to make the philosophical-political case for the constitutional architecture as designed, willing to commit to the operational refusals that would make the case real, willing to use the campaign itself as the instrument for re-educating the polity about what the presidency actually is and is supposed to do. The case is grounded in the constitutional record, in the founding generation’s own understanding of the office, in the political-philosophical commitments that produced the republican-liberal tradition these pages have been defending.
The case can be made. The case has not been made by either party’s nominees within living memory.
I want a presidential candidate committed to making it. Until that candidate emerges, the corrective will continue to be deferred and the inflated office will continue to produce the authoritarian risks that the inflation has been quietly building toward across the past century. The current crisis is the apex symptom of a structural pattern that bipartisan presidential-power inflation has been building across decades, and the corrective is the candidate who would campaign to dismantle the infrastructure of the office they are seeking. The dismantling is what moving politics back to the people actually requires.
I recall in early 2020, when it appeared inevitable that Sanders would be the Democratic nominee for President (and, yes, I am well aware that Sanders did not run as the sort of candidate you propose here), one pundit, who supported much of his policy platform, remarked that the single best thing Sanders could do as President, beyond anything in said platform, would be to push Congress to pass legislation to remove the various regulatory powers that had been delegated by Congress to the executive with repeal of the delegation protected by the veto and, after INS v. Chadha, override of specific regulations also by protected by the same.