Congress in the 19th Century Was More Important Than the President
Historian H.W. Brands Discusses the Golden Age of Congressional Government
“The president was not the most important political player in the 19th century. Besides Jefferson at the beginning, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, the center of politics was Congress,” observed University of Texas historian H.W. Brands.
One adage is that a president proposes and Congress disposes. “Members of Congress are somewhat reluctant to tangle with a president who seems to have the backing of the American people.”
If a president is ignorant or uninterested in the details of public policy, he probably won’t get much of his agenda through Congress, Brands pointed out. “When a president doesn’t know the policy, it doesn’t make for a very effective leader.”
He says “presidents are evaluated not by what they did by the stroke of their own pen; it’s what they persuade Congress to do.”
In Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, Brands the story of the early 19th–century political giants who took up the daunting challenge of completing the constitutional work begun by the Founding Fathers and the decades leading up to the Civil War.
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