The US Election: 5. Becoming President

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Hello and welcome to Understand the U.S.

Election, your go-to guide to this presidential election year in America.

A guide to what normally happens with a nod to the abnormality of the times.

My guests and I look at how the candidates are selected, what happens on the campaign trail on election night, during the inauguration, and beyond.

A bit of history as well, but no predictions.

We try to stick to the facts.

My name is Justin Webb.

I'm one of the hosts of Americast, our BBC Sounds podcast on all things American.

I lived in the U.S.

for the best part of a decade.

My youngest daughter was born there, so could one day be president.

Today, episode five of five, we are talking about the power that she would wield, what you can do when you make it to the White House, and equally important in the age we live in, what you can't do as well.

Sarah Smith, the current North America editor, is joining me to share her wisdom.

Sarah's a fellow presenter too of Americas.

Hello, Sarah.

Hi, y'all.

And my other guest today, Margaret Amara, Chair of American History at the University of Washington.

Margaret, Margaret, thank you so much for being with us.

Hello.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Right, so we've made it through the fight to be the nominee, the campaign trail, the very long campaign trail, the fierce TV debates if they take place, Election Day itself, and there's a winner.

Sarah, what happens next?

There is not an immediate takeover of power.

The new president, he or she doesn't move immediately into the White House the way a new Prime Minister in the UK moves straight into Downing Street.

There is a transition period.

And the new president starts to put their team around them and get ready for taking office, which doesn't happen until the 20th of January, when, of course, we have an inauguration, which is a large and important ceremony that happens outside the Congress in Washington, D.C.

And it's at that moment once the new president is sworn in that they take control.

And Margaret, when there is a change of administration, Does the existing administration just cool its heels?

What do they do?

Are they inevitably a lame duck from that moment on?

Well, they are, and so is Congress.

Congress is also on this schedule of new members being elected in November, and then the Senate and the members of the House of Representatives take office on January 3rd, a couple of weeks beforehand.

So there is this lame duck period.

But what the administration is doing in the modern presidency is ideally working very hard with the incoming president and his or her team to get them ready to be up and running at 12:01 p.m.

on January 20th, which is when they have to be ready to go.

And there might be global crises of all kinds going on and the baton needs to be handed from one to another.

That's why the transition period is quite important.

And Margaret, if there isn't a change of administration,

what then?

I mean, is there anything that has to happen?

Do they just carry on?

They carry on.

The transition period is usually a time of celebration.

We got re-elected.

And also making plans and pronouncements about all the things that the president will do with his or her mandate for a second term, whether or not it was a tight election or not.

They will be new appointments.

Oftentimes, the transition between one term and another is one when a lot of appointees, cabinet secretaries, and others will leave and go back to their civilian jobs and new folks will come in.

It's very exhausting working in the White House or working in a presidential administration.

It's rare that people last for all eight years if there is a two-term presidency, although people do.

Right, Sarah, you're elected president, you've had that inauguration day, you've had the lunch or whatever it is, and you go back to the White House and you sit at your desk in the Oval Office.

What do you then have the power to do?

Well, quite a lot and not very much at the same time.

The President is the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and can command them to do what he or she wants.

But if the President concludes a treaty with other countries, that still needs to be ratified by the Senate, which usually takes a two-thirds majority.

And the President can veto bills that come from Congress or sign them into law, but the President can't really initiate the legislative process.

So in many ways, the President is just receiving from Congress what they want to get done in America and then approving or vetoing it.

Of course, there are other things that may come up, like appointing Supreme Court justices, which can be a hugely important and influential thing to do.

The one way in which the President can exercise some power is by issuing executive orders.

And a lot of them tend to do quite a few of them on day one because that's the one way in which they can get their own ideas across.

It's not really defined what an executive order can and cannot do but there are certain places they can't go.

For instance, a recent one that President Biden signed trying to alleviate student debt for a lot of U.S.

graduates was actually struck down by the Supreme Court who said that really it would have taken an act of Congress to authorize this and that the President alone couldn't do it.

I believe the Court's decision to strike down my student debt relief program was a mistake, was wrong.

I'm not going to stop fighting to deliver borrowers what they need, particularly those at the bottom end of the economic scale.

So we need to find a new way.

And we're moving as fast as we can.

And of course the other thing, Sarah, that can give you a huge boost of your power from day one on is if you've come into power and either you're inheriting a Congress, Senate and House of Representatives of your own party, or you sweep all before you and win both.

Because that really does lead, doesn't it, to a kind of turbocharged presidency, at least in theory.

Yeah, in that instance, the president would be able to work with the leader of the House of Representatives and his leader in the Senate as well, and they would all be on the same page with the legislation that they wanted to get passed through both houses so that it could make its way to the president's desk and he or she could sign it.

It's not that often that the president has that much control, and almost always going into their second term, they'll find that they don't have control of both houses of Congress, in which case legislation can just be held up interminably.

If either the Senate or the House of Representatives won't pass it, you can get a very frustrated president who's just not able to get through the legislation he wants.

Right, that's Congress.

What about the Vice President?

What are the powers of the Vice President?

What are they meant to do?

Well, one of the key things that the Vice President does, which we've seen in action recently, is act as the casting vote in the Senate.

The Vice President is the leader of the Senate.

And Kamala Harris, the current vice president, pretty much spent the first couple of years of her vice presidency sitting in the Senate and casting that vote because it was 50-50 Democrat and Republican senators.

In circumstances where it's not as crucial that the vice president cast their vote, they could be given specific tasks by the president, sometimes some slightly unwelcome ones.

Kamala Harris has been supposedly in charge of sorting out border security and immigration policy, which was a bit of a poison chalice and not very much has been done on.

You will quite often see vice presidents disappearing into the background pretty quickly.

They may well have had an outsized role in the campaign using their influence to try and get their president into office.

But once they're there, a lot of them end up very frustrated that they simply don't have the power to do very much.

I want to turn to the history of the role of the president with you, Margaret, if I may, because it obviously has changed down the years and there have been quite a few of those years.

So since the first president, since George Washington, what has happened to the power of the president and the ability of that person, and it has always been that man until now, to get done what he wants done?

Well, the modern presidency is far more powerful than the architects of the Constitution ever, ever envisioned.

Keep in mind the United States was an enterprise that occurred because of desire to get away from having kings and having one person in charge.

And the presidency, in fact, wasn't an office that was in the original Articles of Confederation, which was the first founding document governing the United States.

They realized quickly that they needed somebody to be a commander-in-chief of the military, someone to execute the laws passed by Congress.

It's called the executive branch for a reason, reason, because it is executing legislation.

And that really encapsulates a lot of what the legislators, who were the ones who wrote the Constitution, thought of the presidency, that it was kind of a helpmeet and a partner rather than something that was a supreme brand.

And really, a turning point in the power of the presidency occurred not simply with the enlargement of the government and the United States becoming an industrial superpower starting at the beginning of the 20th century, but particularly its status as a military and a nuclear superpower that started in 1945.

And with the growth of the national security state, which the president has oversight over, that has been a major factor in enlarging the role of the job and also how consequential it is to the rest of the world.

And that brings us back up to date.

Sarah, what are the powers of the president if the president decides that he might want to push those powers or even abuse them?

Yes, there has been a lot of commentary in the United States about whether or not Donald Trump would become an autocratic leader or a dictator if he was re-elected.

And so he was asked directly on Fox News, would you be a dictator?

And he said he would like dictatorial powers for one day in order to act to close the U.S.-Mexico border and also to start drilling for oil again in protected bits of American land because he thinks those are the two priorities that he really wants to get on with.

That does show you to an extent how somebody like Donald Trump is frustrated by the lack of executive power that the President has.

He can't just do whatever he wants once he gets into office.

But of course it has kicked off a very lengthy debate about whether he would be trying to abuse the powers of the presidency to become some kind of autocratic ruler and whether that will test the bounds of the U.S.

Constitution.

Yeah, and Margaret, if he were to do that, say for instance, politicize the Department of Justice, go after people who are his political enemies, try to get them prosecuted for crimes, real or imagined.

If he were to tell the military to do things on American soil that they don't generally do, put down riots, perhaps go to the southern border, perhaps even order them to shoot civilians, what stops him, if anything?

Well, what stops him is the other branches of government and the other people in government.

And I think that is also what's so worrisome about this moment.

As we've seen in the past and in the recent past, the Congress has been a break on presidential power to the great frustration of many a president of both parties.

And if there are Republican majorities in Congress or even with the very, very thin majority that the Democrats hold in the Senate, which is the prognostications are not good that the Democrats are going to hold on to that, but it's a long time till the election, we don't know.

But if you have Congress that's kind of allowing, not putting a break on the executive, allowing Donald Trump to do that.

And you also have a judicial system at the top of which is the Supreme Court, on which there are three justices appointed by Trump and six conservative justices.

If the courts and the Congress do not put the brakes on, then yes, there could be some quite alarming scenarios.

But the way that this is structured is there are supposed to be breaks on power.

The dogged intent of the founding fathers was to prevent this type of a demagogue, a tyrant, autocrat from taking power and taking control.

It is a fact, isn't it, Sarah?

Finally, 2024 could be a pretty odd year in American presidential history.

I mean, there are all manner of things that could happen, and not all of them necessarily predictable even now.

In any presidential election year, there are always, as the former U.S.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would say, known unknowns and unknown unknowns.

I think this year will be even more unpredictable.

That's partly because Donald Trump is in the race and he doesn't respect the normal rules and order of things.

But it's also because everything has become so much more contested.

You have large numbers of the electorate who don't believe the result of the last presidential election in 2020 and are absolutely convinced that there will be electoral fraud happening.

You've got candidates who will go further than ever to try and boost their own election prospects, including going to the courts if they have to.

And we might always say this, but I think even more so than ever in 2024, anything could happen.

That is it from us.

Hopefully we all understand U.S.

elections just a little bit better.

Now, Margaret Amara, thank you so much for joining us.

Great to be here.

And Sarah, of course, too.

A pleasure.

And remember, if you want to keep up to date with everything that is going on during the 2024 elections, you can listen to Americast.

It's available weekly on BBC Sounds.

The full series of Understand the U.S.

Election is also available on BBC Sounds.

See you all later.

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