The November 22 cover of Newsweek depicts President Obama as a many-armed Hindu deity holding up items representing his administration’s many priorities. The article, entitled “God of All Things,” details the many and increasing responsibilities of the chief executive.
President Obama is dealing with a number of priorities: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a still faltering economy, relationships with our allies and expansion of the federal government. As a busy public servant myself, I certainly sympathize with the myriad responsibilities and demands made on the president. I’m certain that he is working his hardest and trying to do what he believes is right for our country.
The Newsweek article briefly discusses some solutions to the problem of an overworked chief executive: relying on cabinet secretaries more, reducing West Wing staff, or even splitting the presidency into two positions — one ceremonial and the other administrative.
The solution the article doesn’t offer is to reduce the president’s responsibilities to a more constitutional role. The federal government and the president were never intended to hold all authority in the United States. The burden of government was to be shared with the states.
In fact, James Madison, writing in The Federalist, thought that the states would still retain greater power under the Constitution: “It has been already proved that the members of the federal will be more dependent on the members of the State governments, than the latter will be on the former. It has appeared also, that the prepossessions of the people, on whom both will depend, will be more on the side of the State governments, than of the federal government.”
Instead, the opposite holds true in many cases. Washington collects and then doles out money to state agencies managing transportation, healthcare, agriculture, policing, and many other functions. With federal money comes federal rules, and at the top of the rulemaking chain is the president’s administration.
Each day, the federal government publishes the Federal Register, a listing of the various rules either adopted or proposed. As of November 19, the Federal Register has 71,004 pages for 2010 alone.
We certainly live in a much more complex world than the founders envisioned, and I don’t believe that we can ever return the federal government to its 18thcentury size and scope. What we can do is look to the ideals of the founders for guidance on how to sensibly share power and responsibility.
President Obama, on the other hand, has been spending most of his time taking on more responsibility. Passing the healthcare bill was the top priority of his administration for a year and a half. But now that it is in law, the administration is responsible for tens of thousands of pages of new regulation. All these new regulations will require thousands of new employees at the Department of Health and Human Services and 16,500 new examiners and agents at the IRS.
The president also spent months pushing Congress to pass a cap-and-trade law that would regulate emissions nationwide. He wanted the federal government to hand out billions of additional research dollars collected from new taxes. Essentially, the federal government would have been in charge of energy generation and prices for the entire nation.
There is hardly an area of government where President Obama’s administration isn’t calling for more federal intervention. With each new federal intervention, there is more demand for attention from the chief executive. Ultimately, the job of the president may become too big for one man, but not if we adhere more closely to the principles of federalism.
I’m a member of the House Tenth Amendment Task Force, a group of Representatives looking for ways to disperse power from Washington. Limiting the power of the federal government is just one of the ways that we can control our federal budget and deficit. It is also one of the ways we protect the liberty of the American people.
Being president will always be a big job, but by more closely following the Constitution we can make that a manageable job — a job that doesn’t require a deity, just a single person.
Rep. Joe Pitts represents Pennsylvania’s 16th Congressional District.