— VOA Learning English — America's Presidents Source: Voice of America Learning English (https://learningenglish.voanews.com/) Licence: Public domain (work of the U.S. federal government, 17 U.S.C. §105) Audio is served by the publisher; Budi does not host or modify it.
0:05VOA Learning English presents America's Presidents. Today we are not going to talk about any one president. We will instead talk about the presidency itself, what some people call the office of the presidency. That does not mean the room where the leader of the United States works. Here it means the position and powers of the US President. Sidney Milkus is part of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. He and others at the Miller center are specialists on US political history. Milkus says that, when it was created in the late 1700s, the US presidency was unlike any other position in world history. In other words, the idea of giving a lot of power to one person made sense if the country
1:39were a monarchy and ruled by a king or queen, and giving a lot of power to an elected group in a legislature made sense if the country was a democracy and voters elected representatives. But giving a power to one person in a democracy did not seem to make sense. The writers of the Constitution understood this situation. They were concerned about giving one person too much power. Remember, the country's founders had just fought a war for independence against the British. The American colonists had not liked being under the control of a British king. They also worried that a strong executive could become a tyrant or corrupt, adds Harry Rubenstein. He is a curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.
2:43But the Constitution's writers had also seen the problems of a weak executive branch. Asking state legislatures to make national decisions took too long, and sometimes the problems were never resolved at all. Historian Sidney Milkis says that as a result of these ideas, some of them conflicting, The writers of the Constitution argued about what the office of the president should be. There were people like James Madison and Jefferson who thought the president's power should be limited, and the term president meant preside, and Congress and the state should be the leading venues of American democracy. Other people who helped write the US Constitution, such as Alexander Hamilton, thought the president should be what Milkis calls the anchor of American democracy.
3:39Hamilton thought that the president should have enough power to direct large projects for the public good. So, what happened? Well, in 1787 delegates to the Constitutional Convention found a unique solution. First, they agreed to make the president a one-person job. One person, they reasoned, could both make decisions more effectively than a group and be more easily held responsible for them. But they decided not to give the president too much power. The person would be elected for one four-year term at a time, and the president would share power with a national legislature and a Supreme Court. The delegates also decided some of the details about how the president would be elected and how to remove the person from office.
4:40And they said the President would have a number of duties. They include being the Commander-in-Chief of the military, nominating public officials and giving Congress a report on the State of the Union. This list comes from Article 2 of the US Constitution. But a lot of the job description was left open. It said, The President shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed. Since it was written in 1787, That expression has informed discussions about what powers the US president should really have. Historian Sidney Milkis says Americans are still debating how much power the president should have. For most of the nineteenth century, he says, the powers of the President were more limited. But since the twentieth century, the position has become more powerful.
5:41The President has moved closer to the center of American democracy. But in time, Milkis says, Americans may decide to limit the President's authority again and give more power to Congress and state governments. Milkus adds one more thing about the unusual invention of the US President. It was unclear that the public would trust a national executive, but as our America's Presidents series shows, for the most part, Americans respect the office of the president. Instead of fearing our great leaders, says Milkus, we honor them. I'm Kelli Jean Kelley.
This transcript was generated automatically from the recording, so it will contain mistakes — especially around names and places.