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The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Presidential Power | 
| Author: Gene Healy
Publisher: Cato Institute
Category: Book
List Price: $22.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 20075
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 264
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.3 x 1.4
ISBN: 1933995157
Dewey Decimal Number: 352.230973
EAN: 9781933995151
ASIN: 1933995157
Publication Date: April 25, 2008 (New: Last 30 Days)
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Condition: Brand New. 100% money back guarantee. All books shipped from Strand Bookstore, New York City, USA.
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Product Description
The Bush years have justifiably given rise to fears of a new Imperial Presidency. Yet despite the controversy surrounding the administration's expansive claims of executive power, both Left and Right agree on the boundless nature of presidential responsibility. The Imperial Presidency is the price we seem to be willingly and dangerously agreeable to pay the office the focus of our national hopes and dreams. Interweaving historical scholarship, legal analysis, and cultural commentary, The Cult of the Presidency argues that the Presidency needs to be reined in, its powers checked and supervised, and its wartime authority put back under the oversight of the Congress and the courts. Only then will we begin to return the Presidency to its proper constitutionally limited role.
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| Customer Reviews:
A book Americans need to read--especially this year May 7, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Do yourself--and the country--a favor, and pick up a copy of Cato Institute scholar Gene Healy's new book, The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power. This important book has the potential to start a much-needed national conversation about the monstrous amount of power we invest in the individual who occupies the White House at any given moment.
Every four years, we find ourselves in a national tizzy. Some of us have hopes that ________________ (insert your favorite power-hungry presidential candidate here) will somehow save the country. But most of us fret about the possibility that _________________ (insert your least favorite power-hungry presidential candidate here) may wreak economic or foreign-policy havoc.
And we have good reason to fret. Once he or she becomes a resident at 1600 Pennsylvania, the elected president has a finger on the nuclear button, the ability to start wars unilaterally, and the power to meddle forcefully in the US economy via executive orders and regulatory fiat.
On paper, there are checks and balances on the presidency, but those checks and balances are easily overridden by a national psychology in which the masses look to the president to solve their daily economic problems and combat every evil, whether domestic or foreign. We are repeatedly disappointed by the performance of our presidents, but we continue to give them greater and greater powers.
Healy's book examines the historical origins of our cultish devotion to the presidency, and explains the danger to America of placing too much power in the hands of one person--no matter who that person is, or what party he/she belongs to.
This is a book Americans need to read--especially this year.
(Lower-case p intended.)
The Healer-, Pastor-, Comforter-, Soul Toucher-, Motivator-, and Messiah-in-Chief May 7, 2008
Healy offers a thorough, acerbic, witty, and timely critique of the rise of the American monarchy. It's somewhat ironic that as we Americans celebrate our revolution to overthrow the British Crown each July, and as we denounce dictators and totalitarian regimes across the globe, we also celebrate and venerate those presidents who most behaved like dictators, and who most sought to aggrandize their own power at the expense of the constitutional checks and balances that set our system of government apart from all tried before us.
We exalt the Roosevelts (both), Eisenhowers, and Wilsons--men who stifled free speech, imprisoned dissenters, and overstepped their constitutional bounds. Meanwhile, the men who, as Healy puts it, "merely" oversaw years of peace and prosperity--men like Calvin Coolidge, Grover Cleveland, and the heavily whiskered presidents of the 19th century--are ridiculed as do-nothings.
As we approach a November 2008 likely featuring a TR acolyte against a JFK acolyte, Healy's book is a needed, welcome addition to the debate, a reminder that the office of the presidency was intended to be a modest office, merely an administrator of the executive branch. That it has morphed into a kind of messianic position of all-encompassing power and reverence is a troubling development, and doesn't bode well for the American experiment.
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