Forget What You Have Learned

You probably already know what happens when the lame duck period kicks in for a president, right? It is the period of time where the president is at his weakest, as the country, and more importantly, political elites begin looking to the next administration and how to deal with the next president. The new president will not be able to get anything ambitious passed through the Congress because the Congress has no incentive to work with him, particularly when the other Party controls the Congress. You are probably taught this iron law of presidential power as early as high school government class, and most definitely there will be an instructor in the American Government 101 who will not just teach this fact, but will also include it on the exam. Typical of just how powerful this ideal is can be found in this May 17 story by CBS reporter Dick Meyer, who wrote: Short of another disaster on the scale of 9/11, George Bush no longer has the power, credibility or ability to effectively govern for the rest of his term in office.

While your Intro to American Government professor may want you to believe this, and even a reporter at CBS News will write it with certainty, the fact of the matter is, it is not true--or at least it is not true to the level of an iron law. Sure, the president's ability to get anything through Congress will be greatly diminished, and his ability to move the public won't be what it once was, it is wrong to count the president out. In fact, the president may be able to exercise as much power at the end as he did at the beginning.

Several years ago I served as a discussant on a panel where the theme was unique exercise of presidential power, and one paper described this lame duck power exercised by the president. The paper went on to get published in the flagship journal Presidential Studies Quarterly, and I recommend it highly to any of you interested in presidential power.

Titled "The Last One-Hundred Days" and written by William Howell (then at Harvard and now at the University of Chicago) and Kenneth Mayer (at the University of Wisconsin at Madison) looked at how the president turns to the administrative agencies in order to accomplish his goals, thus succeeding administratively where he would fail legislatively. Here is a list of things that President Clinton managed to do in his last year in office:

• He lowered the acceptable levels of arsenic in our drinking water from 50 parts per billion (ppb) to 10 ppb, which would go into effect in March 2001--leaving the political controversy in the lap of the new administration. When President Bush hinted at scrapping the rule and moving back to 50 ppb, the DNC ran television ads with a child asking its mother: "Can I please have some arsenic in my water, mommy?"
• In his last week in office, he issued a presidential proclamation which declared one million acres private land as public monuments. If the Congress wanted to reverse, it would have to repeal a 1906 law with a new law of its own.
• He had the DC license plates changed so that the words: NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION appeared, knowing that this was a thumb to the eye of the incoming Bush administration, which had publicly stated its opposition to statehood. Bush had to order the plates removed from the presidential limo before it drove him to the inauguration.
  

Today's "New York Times" has an article documenting the energy in the the Bush administration to push through as much of its remaining goals administratively before the clock runs out. "Times" reporter John Broder writes: "...President Bush has his cabinet and staff busily writing far-reaching rules to keep his priorities on the environment, public lands, homeland security, health and safety in place long after the clock strikes midnight and his limousine turns into a pumpkin." And sure enough, the administration is changing a number of rules that will benefit key political interests as he is leaving office--in such areas as environmental conservation and health insurance. All the rules represent the potential to add millions of dollars to the coffers of these business. For instance, the Office of Surface Mining just changed a rule regarding the waste from blowing the lid off mountain tops. It appeared that when coal companies would blast the top of a mountain, the run off would be allowed to spill into the valleys and rivers below, which led to the blocking of water flow or worst, poisoning the drinking water for hundreds of thousands poor families. The rule had been that the companies would need to insure that this didn't happen if they wished to engage in this manner of mining, but the new rule now clears the way for the dumping of "excess rock and soil into valleys and streams." So much for the poor Appalachians whose pitiful lives just got worse.

Before we all start looking toward the next administration, it would do us well to continue to keep an eye on the current one. The Founders worried that if you remove the prospect of facing the voters from a president, you take away any incentive he has to behave himself. Sounds about right.