Landmark Executive Actions

Sources and Limits of Executive Power

• Constitutional powers (Article II): commander in chief; making treaties with the advice and consent of two-thirds of the Senate; appointing officials with Senate confirmation; granting pardons; receiving ambassadors; and taking care that the laws be faithfully executed.
• Executive orders: directives to federal agencies with the force of law, based on the Constitution or on laws passed by Congress. They can be overturned by courts, superseded by Congress, or revoked by a later president. In Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer (1952), the Supreme Court struck down President Truman's seizure of steel mills during the Korean War because neither the Constitution nor Congress authorized it.
• Executive agreements: agreements with foreign leaders that do not require Senate ratification.
• Informal power: persuasion, the "bully pulpit."

Foreign Policy

Treaties that ended wars

Presidents negotiate peace treaties, and the Senate must approve them by a two-thirds vote.

• Treaty of Paris (1783): ended the Revolutionary War; Britain recognized American independence. It was negotiated under the Articles of Confederation by Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay.
• Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848): President James K. Polk; ended the Mexican-American War. Mexico ceded California and much of the Southwest (the Mexican Cession) and recognized the Rio Grande as the Texas border, in return for $15 million.
• Treaty of Paris (1898): President William McKinley; ended the Spanish-American War. Spain ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the U.S. (the U.S. paid $20 million for the Philippines) and gave up its claim to Cuba. It marked the U.S. emergence as an overseas power. Ratification sparked a fierce Senate debate over imperialism.

Territorial Expansion

• Louisiana Purchase (1803), Thomas Jefferson: bought about 828,000 square miles west of the Mississippi from Napoleon's France for $15 million, roughly doubling the nation's size. Jefferson doubted that the Constitution allowed the government to acquire territory but went ahead under the treaty power. He sent Lewis and Clark to explore it.
• Adams-Onís Treaty (signed 1819; took effect 1821), James Monroe: negotiated by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. Spain ceded Florida to the U.S., and the treaty set the boundary between U.S. and Spanish territory to the Pacific. Florida became a U.S. territory in 1822 and a state in 1845.
• Annexation of Texas (1845) was done by joint resolution of Congress, and the Oregon Treaty (1846) with Britain set the northwest border at the 49th parallel.
• Gadsden Purchase (1853): bought land from Mexico in present-day southern Arizona and New Mexico.
• Purchase of Alaska (1867), Andrew Johnson: Secretary of State William Seward bought Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million. Critics mocked it as "Seward's Folly" until gold and other resources proved its value.
• Annexation of Hawaii (1898) was also accomplished by joint resolution of Congress.

Civil Rights and Liberties: Expanded or Restricted

Lincoln suspends habeas corpus (1861)

At the start of the Civil War, President Lincoln authorized military commanders to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and detain suspected Confederate sympathizers without bringing them before a judge, first along the route between Philadelphia and Washington. In Ex parte Merryman (1861), Chief Justice Taney, sitting as a circuit judge, ruled that only Congress could suspend the writ, since the Suspension Clause is in Article I. Lincoln did not comply. Congress authorized suspension in 1863. After the war, Ex parte Milligan (1866) held that military tribunals could not try civilians where civil courts were open. This is an example of restricting civil liberties in wartime.

The Emancipation Proclamation (1863)

Lincoln issued a preliminary proclamation on September 22, 1862, after the Battle of Antietam. The final proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863. Acting as commander in chief, Lincoln declared enslaved people in areas "in rebellion against the United States" to be free.

• It did not apply to slave states that remained loyal (such as Kentucky and Maryland) or to areas already under Union control. It could be enforced only as Union armies advanced.
• It made ending slavery a Union war aim, discouraged Britain and France from supporting the Confederacy, and allowed Black men to serve in the Union army and navy. Nearly 200,000 did.
• Because it was a war measure, a constitutional amendment was needed to end slavery permanently: the 13th Amendment (1865).

Executive Order 9066 (1942): Japanese American internment

Ten weeks after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the military to designate exclusion zones. About 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of them U.S. citizens, were removed from the West Coast and held in internment camps. The Supreme Court upheld it in Korematsu v. United States (1944). In 1988, Congress formally apologized and paid $20,000 to each surviving internee. This is the clearest example of an executive action restricting civil liberties.

Enforcing civil rights rulings

• Little Rock (1957), Dwight D. Eisenhower: Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus used the state National Guard to block nine Black students, the Little Rock Nine, from entering Central High School despite Brown v. Board of Education. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent the Army's 101st Airborne Division to escort the students. This showed that federal court orders would be enforced.
• University of Mississippi (1962), John F. Kennedy: Kennedy sent federal marshals and troops so that James Meredith could enroll.
• University of Alabama (1963), John F. Kennedy: Governor George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door to block Vivian Malone and James Hood from enrolling. Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard, and Wallace stepped aside. That night Kennedy addressed the nation, calling civil rights "a moral issue" and proposing the bill that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Executive Orders: Desegregation and Affirmative Action

The Bully Pulpit

Theodore Roosevelt called the presidency a "bully pulpit." At the time, "bully" meant excellent. The president has an unmatched platform to persuade the public and pressure Congress. Since the 20th century, mass media has magnified this informal power.

• Fireside chats (from 1933), Franklin D. Roosevelt: radio talks that explained the banking crisis, the New Deal, and World War II directly to Americans in their homes.
• Kennedy's inaugural address (1961): "Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country." It is a famous call to civic participation.
• "Great Society" speech (1964), Lyndon B. Johnson: at the University of Michigan, Johnson called for ending poverty and racial injustice, building support for his legislative program.
• "Tear down this wall!" (1987), Ronald Reagan: at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin, Reagan challenged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to open the Berlin Wall. The wall fell in 1989.
• The constitutionally required State of the Union address (Article II) and, today, television and social media are modern forms of the bully pulpit.

Presidential War Powers

The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, raise and support armies, and fund the military (Article I). It makes the president commander in chief (Article II). Congress has formally declared war in only five conflicts: the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, and the two World Wars. Many other conflicts were fought without a declaration.

• Lincoln (1861): blockaded Southern ports, expanded the army, and suspended habeas corpus before Congress met. The Court upheld the blockade in the Prize Cases (1863).
• Korea (1950), Truman: sent U.S. forces under a United Nations resolution without a declaration of war, calling it a "police action."
• Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), Kennedy: imposed a naval "quarantine" (blockade) of Cuba to force the removal of Soviet nuclear missiles. After 13 tense days, the Soviets agreed to withdraw them.
• Vietnam: escalated under the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which led Congress to pass the War Powers Resolution (1973).
• After 9/11: presidents relied on the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, and in 2002 Congress authorized force against Iraq.

The trend: presidential war-making power has grown, and Congress's main tools for checking it are funding, oversight, and the War Powers Resolution.