Part II: The Presidency

The Executive Vacuum: Why weak Congresses produce stronger presidents — and worse governance

Photo by David Everett Strickler on Unsplash

The American president was not designed to be the nation’s problem‑solver‑in‑chief. The job, on paper, is narrow and almost modest: execute the laws Congress passes, command the military when called upon, conduct foreign policy, and otherwise respect the boundaries set by the legislature.

That is not the job most Americans think the president has now.

Today, when something feels broken — student debt, immigration, health care, policing, social media, you name it — the reflex is simple: “The president should do something.” We expect one person, sitting atop the executive branch, to fix what an entire Congress either cannot or will not touch.

This is not just a cultural shift. It is the predictable consequence of a legislature that has abandoned its own responsibilities. When Congress refuses to legislate clearly, presidents are pushed to act unilaterally. When lawmakers hide behind vague statutes, executives step into the gray. When the people lose faith in 535 members who won’t govern, they pin their hopes and anger on the one office that still looks capable of movement.

We call this an imperial presidency, as if it grew out of individual ambition alone.

In reality, it grew out of a vacuum.

From co‑equal executive to crisis manager‑in‑chief

In the civics‑textbook version of American government, the three branches are described as coequal: Congress makes the laws, the executive carries them out, and the courts interpret them. The president is important, but structurally subordinate to the legislature’s will.

That model didn’t survive contact with the modern era.

Across the twentieth century, crisis after crisis pulled the presidency into a different role. Wars, depressions, terrorist attacks, pandemics — each one reinforced the idea that when the country is in trouble, it is the president who must move first and fastest while Congress argues in the background. Over time, what began as emergency improvisation hardened into expectation.

The shift was gradual but unmistakable. Theodore Roosevelt championed a “stewardship” theory of the office, insisting that presidents could do anything not explicitly forbidden if they believed it served the public good. Franklin Roosevelt then expanded that logic dramatically during the Great Depression and World War II, centralizing authority in the White House while Congress largely ratified what the executive branch had already designed. The modern “first 100 days” benchmark goes back to Franklin Roosevelt, whose first 100 days combined emergency legislation with an intense burst of executive action to confront the Depression.

Americans got used to this model. They saw presidents at podiums in moments of fear and uncertainty and began to equate leadership with unilateral action. They watched Congress dither and stall and started to treat it as background noise. The president became the face of national decision‑making — crisis manager‑in‑chief, moral explainer‑in‑chief, and, increasingly, legislator‑in‑chief by other means.

The crucial point is this: the presidency did not rise in a vacuum of character. It rose in a vacuum of congressional will. As lawmakers traded legislative craftsmanship for political safety, they created an environment where any president — good, bad, or mediocre — would be pushed to stretch the office simply to keep the machinery of government moving.

Executive action as ritual performance

There was a time when executive orders were mostly technical instruments — tools presidents used to direct the bureaucracy on how to carry out laws Congress had already passed. They were visible, but not the main way a presidency announced itself.

In the modern era, that has flipped. It is now almost expected that a new president will arrive in Washington and, on Day One, sit at a polished desk surrounded by cameras, signing a flurry of sweeping executive orders “from on high.” The images are deliberate: stacks of leather‑bound folders, a line of pens, and a choreographed procession of signatures and cheering allies. This is not just governance; it is theater.

The “first 100 days” once meant a sprint to push legislation through Congress, a benchmark born from Franklin Roosevelt’s early New Deal, when he called Congress into emergency session and signed 99 executive orders in that window. Today, the phrase survives mostly as a media countdown clock and a talking point in campaign ads and cable hits. Presidents now preview their first 90 or 180 days as a list of executive actions — what they will reverse, cancel, or decree the moment they take office, often because nobody seriously believes Congress will move that fast, or at all.

So executive orders have taken on a double life. On paper, they are administrative directives: written instructions to agencies about how to interpret and implement existing law. In practice, they have become symbols — proof to a restless public that a new president is “doing something,” even if that something may be challenged in court, reversed by the next administration, or quietly undermined by the same bureaucracy it was meant to command.

The ritual is familiar now. In campaigns, candidates promise what they will “sign on day one.” Transition teams leak draft orders to signal priorities. The media tallies the number of executive orders in a president’s first weeks as if it were a stat line measuring strength. Datasets from the American Presidency Project make clear that modern presidents now routinely issue dozens of orders in their first year alone; in Trump’s second term, he issued 26 executive orders on his first day back in office, and by the end of 2025 had already surpassed his entire first‑term total.

We have built a culture where presidents are judged less by the laws they help shepherd through Congress and more by how many unilateral strokes of the pen they can deliver before the “first 100 days” clock runs out.

The tragedy is that this performance is not happening in a vacuum. It unfolds against the backdrop of a Congress that no longer writes careful laws, avoids hard votes, and increasingly relies on the executive branch to shoulder the burden of actual decision‑making. The pageantry of Day One orders and 100‑day scorecards is a symptom of that deeper failure. When the legislature stops governing, governing itself becomes a televised signing ceremony.

Executive orders are downstream, not the disease

It’s easy to blame executive orders themselves for what feels like presidential overreach. The images are jarring: one person signing directives that affect millions of lives without a single recorded vote in Congress. But focusing on the pen misses the real problem. The problem is why the pen is doing so much work in the first place.

Presidents reach for executive orders most aggressively when Congress refuses to act, acts incoherently, or acts so vaguely that nobody can tell what the law actually demands. Immigration, student loans, environmental rules, pandemic responses — issue after issue ends up in the Oval Office inbox not because presidents “stole” them, but because lawmakers either punted or sent half‑finished statutes into the world. In that vacuum, executive orders become a form of political spackle: a way to patch over gaps the legislature left open.

This doesn’t absolve presidents who stretch their authority. Some orders clearly push beyond what the law can bear and invite well‑deserved judicial pushback, since federal courts can review and strike down executive orders that lack a valid legal basis. But even those overreaches sit on top of a deeper reality: if Congress wrote precise laws, updated them when conditions changed, and took real votes on hard questions, there would be far less room — and far less demand — for unilateral improvisation from the White House.

We complain about presidents “ruling by decree,” and then, election after election, we send back a Congress that has no intention of governing at that same level of clarity or courage. Executive orders are not the root of the disease. They are what it looks like when a sick legislature tries to outsource its responsibilities to a single office and then acts surprised when that office grows to fill the space.

The feedback loop: weak Congress → strong presidency → weaker Congress

Every time Congress refuses to legislate clearly, it teaches presidents a simple lesson: if you want something done, you will have to do it yourself. Each high‑profile failure on Capitol Hill — whether on immigration, budget reform, or social policy — creates pressure on the White House to “step up” with executive action. Voters demand results, and the only institution that still looks capable of moving quickly is the presidency.

Over time, this dynamic flips the original hierarchy on its head. Instead of Congress setting the agenda and presidents implementing it, presidents now set the agenda and Congress reacts — if it reacts at all. Lawmakers fundraise off or grandstand against executive actions they quietly depend on. They get the luxury of outrage without the burden of authoring a serious alternative. Analyses of recent years have been blunt about this: today’s Congress increasingly behaves less like a coequal branch and more like a sideline commentator, surrendering much of its own authority on the hardest questions.

The more presidents govern this way, the more normalized it becomes. Each administration inherits a toolbox of aggressive precedents: emergency declarations stretched for policy goals, expansive interpretations of old statutes, sweeping regulatory moves justified by vague language Congress never fixed. It becomes harder for any future president to voluntarily shrink the office, because stepping back would look like weakness compared to what the last occupant did. Commentators have described a legislature that is retreating from the world and from its own authority, even as presidents continue to reach further.

Meanwhile, Congress atrophies. Why build coalitions, take risky votes, and slog through regular order when it is easier to yell about what the president did, or didn’t do, with the stroke of a pen? A branch that once defined itself by its jealous protection of legislative power now behaves like a permanent commentary panel — offended by overreach, dependent on it, and increasingly irrelevant to the core work of governing.

This is the loop: a weak Congress invites a stronger presidency; a stronger presidency makes it even harder to rebuild Congress; and with each turn of the cycle, more and more unresolved questions are pushed somewhere else — to the agency lawyers, to the regulators, and ultimately to the courts. Those disputes land in front of judges, who are asked to decide just how far executive power can stretch — yet another example of judicial review doing work the legislature avoided.

A stronger presidency and a weaker republic

The modern presidency is often described as “imperial,” as if the office had simply broken free of its constraints by force of will. There is some truth in that language — but it obscures the deeper reality. The presidency did not become dominant in a vacuum. It expanded into the space Congress left empty.

We have built a system where one person is expected to govern by press conference, executive order, and emergency declaration, while 535 others shelter behind manufactured gridlock and omnibus confusion. Presidents improvise in the gray zones, agencies stretch to keep up, and the courts are left to decide, case by case, how far any of it can go.

This does not make presidents “strong” in any healthy sense. It makes our politics brittle. Policies swing wildly from one administration to the next. Major questions are settled by temporary directives rather than durable law. Trust erodes as people watch the machinery of government lurch from one unilateral fix to another.

In Part I, the story began with a Congress that chose comfort over consequence and discovered it could survive without governing. In Part II, we’ve seen what fills that vacuum: a presidency that governs more and more by improvisation, ritual, and sheer expectation.

In Part III, we turn to the judiciary — the last branch that still looks anything like the one we were taught about in school — and ask what happens when the weakest branch on paper becomes the strongest branch in practice, simply because it is the only one left that still takes its role seriously.

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