ABSTRACT
It was widely believed that the dynamics of American politics virtually guaranteed a compatibility between presidential policy and the highest goals of the American regime, that what was good for the presidency was good for the country. In the wake of sustained public criticism of what appeared to be unfettered executive power, scholarship on the nation's highest office has entered a new period characterized by dissatisfaction with the settled views of the recent past and a renewed attention to the problems posed by executive power for constitutional government. This chapter begins to bridge the gap between the legal and political approaches by reconsidering the various ways in which political forms may influence political practice. To many contemporary observers the recent history of presidential power has been characterized by the violation of one of the central principles of American constitutionalism: the need to channel and restrain the exercise of executive power through a fabric of law.
