The presidency – Liberation News

Photo: Marine One, the official helicopter of the president, departs from the White House lawn. Public domain.

Every young person in America is taught in school about the wonders of the U.S. system of government – brilliantly designed to protect freedom, flexible enough to solve any problem, and given legitimacy by the consent of the governed. But this fairy tale version of U.S. politics bears no resemblance to reality.  

In fact, these notions might seem so outlandish that many people’s eyes glaze over at the mere mention of the intricacies of how the government functions. But for those who want to put an end to this unjust order, it is absolutely essential to understand those intricacies. It is not necessary to grasp the ins-and-outs of the constitution or the legislative process to come to the conclusion that the system has to end – but to actually bring about this profound transformation of society we need to know in detail how our enemy operates. 

Liberation News is producing the “Civics Class for Radicals” series to shine light on the reality of this system of government of, by and for the rich.  

Read Part 1 on the Supreme Court here, and Part 2 on Congress here

Of all the capitalist states in the world, the U.S. government stands unmatched in its contempt for the needs of working people, the vast scope of its power, and its capacity for violence. At the very top of this apparatus is a single person: the president. The authority invested in this office is immense and constantly growing.

The president is the head of the executive branch of the government. Karl Marx’s observation in the Communist Manifesto in 1848 is just as true today as it was then, “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie.” Rather than advancing the interests of particular sectors of capital or individual capitalists, the executive branch of the state is meant to take action to maintain the overall stability of the capitalist system and its capacity to grow.  

The 46 men who have occupied the office of president of the United States wielded this power to shape the course of world history – and commit some of its worst atrocities. 

The executive branch agencies

The vast authority of the executive branch is organized into different departments with a more particular mission. Each department ultimately answers to the president. 

At its core, the state is an institution of organized violence, and several cabinet secretaries are tasked with managing it. The Department of Defense, headquartered at the Pentagon, is in charge of the military. The State Department handles the softer side of imperialist “diplomacy”. The Department of Justice enforces federal law, administers the federal prison system and is in charge of the FBI. The Department of Homeland Security was created after the September 11 attacks to centralize many of the disparate repressive functions of the government – border patrol, ICE, the Coast Guard, the Transportation Security Administration, and others. DHS is also in charge of FEMA, the federal disaster relief agency. 

Other executive branch departments deal with the economy. Most importantly, the Department of the Treasury is responsible for collecting revenue for the government and disbursing it. It is the only entity allowed to print dollars, it issues bonds and pays government debt, and controls the IRS. The Treasury Department has also played an increasingly prominent role in U.S. aggression around the globe by enforcing sanctions through its Office of Foreign Asset Control. There is a separate Department of Commerce that deals with matters related to foreign trade, regulates “intellectual property” through the Patent and Trademark Office, and conducts the Census. The Department of Energy and the Department of Transportation deal with government policy relating to these two sectors that are so crucial to the day-to-day operation of capitalism. The Department of the Interior manages the vast landholdings of the U.S. government and is in charge of policy relating to Indigenous peoples. 

There are several cabinet agencies that were created to administer social programs and related policies created by the government over the years as concessions to people’s movements. However, the departments themselves are sometimes associated with the onerous bureaucracy that people have to navigate. These include the Departments of Labor, Education and Housing and Urban Development. The Department of Health and Human Services is most well-known for administering Medicare and Medicaid. 

HHS also used to be in charge of the Social Security Administration, but it became an independent agency in 1994. Independent agencies are government bodies that are technically part of the executive branch, but not under the authority of a cabinet secretary. This includes the CIA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and regulatory bodies like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission.       

Each department is led by a secretary who is nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. In many cases Senate confirmation is a relatively uneventful affair, but in others it can be an opportunity for the opposing party to score political points by digging up dirt on a nominee and releasing it in the run up to a final vote. In any case, senators who are members of relevant committees have an opportunity to publicly question nominees.

The secretary of a department is the highest ranking example of a political appointee. A political appointee is an official who is installed by the current administration in order to develop and execute its political program. They are typically replaced when one administration ends and another begins. 

Some political appointees are chosen for their expertise in particular matters – the ruling class does want their system to be well-managed, after all – but very frequently appointments are used to repay political (or even personal) favors. The month after his tenure as Vice President ended, Joe Biden was given a highly lucrative position at the University of Pennsylvania as the “Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor” – a fake job that essentially involved giving a handful of speeches from 2017 to 2019, for which he was paid over $910,000. When Biden became the president, he rewarded Amy Guttman, the university president who gave him the job, by naming her the U.S. Ambassador to Germany. Donald Trump named Betsy DeVos to be Secretary of Education even though she has no professional background in education whatsoever. This was obviously a reward for her powerful billionaire family’s bankrolling of Republican candidates, which amounted to over $10 million in the 2016 election cycle alone. 

Other officials in executive branch agencies are called career civil servants. They are professional administrators whose work in the government is not dependent on which administration or party is in power. At the lower levels, career civil servants are public sector workers whose personal interests may be totally at odds with those of the institutions where they work. But high-ranking career civil servants form part of the permanent apparatus of the state, ensuring the efficient functioning of the government in the interests of the ruling class.  

Setting the domestic political agenda

As the most powerful single leader in the entire capitalist state, the president is in a position to set the tone for U.S. politics overall. Through their public statements and initiatives, the president can exercise a great deal of influence over which issues receive the most attention from both the public and the ruling class. 

The White House’s press secretary leads a staff aimed at influencing the mass media and is a cornerstone of an even broader communications operation. Every year, the president gives a speech to a joint session of Congress called the State of the Union address, which lays out the administration’s key goals for the year. But if a president becomes deeply unpopular or their power is otherwise diminished, other leaders of the state may try to take the initiative away and set the national agenda themselves – like Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich attempted in the 1990s with his ultra-right “contract with America” program. 

The president does not have the authority to directly introduce legislation. However, if Congress is led by the same party as the president’s then the White House and Congressional leadership often works together to craft bills and get them passed. If Congress passes a law that the president opposes, then the president can veto that law – meaning they refuse to sign it. Congress can override the president’s veto and pass a bill into law anyway, but only if both chambers vote with a two-thirds majority to do so.

Short of legislating, the president does have the authority to issue executive orders. These official decrees are legally binding and can be highly consequential – for instance, segregation in the armed forces was abolished by executive order. However, they are not unlimited in scope. An executive order must be justified on the basis of either the constitutional authority invested in the presidency or a law passed by Congress that delegates the authority in question to the executive branch. 

Executive orders can be, and frequently are, challenged in court. Federal courts have the power to rule on whether or not the president overstepped their authority, and also have the option of issuing a temporary “stay” pausing the implementation of the policy in question until the judicial process plays out. But this oftentimes is simply about resolving power struggles between ruling class centers and preserving the authority of…