Presidential Powers and Duties

The President of the United States has powers, roles and duties that are expressly enumerated, inherent in the position or assumed. Many of these roles and responsibilities are subject to dispute and change with each president. The source of these powers is the United States Constitution, but judicial decision and the personality of the President have impacted the position over time.

Article II of the United States Constitution establishes the role of president, with the writers granting limited powers. Article II, Section 2 expressly grants to the president the position of Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy and gives him the power to grant “pardons and reprieves”. (US Const. Art. II, sec. 2, 1) Section 2, also specifically granted the presidential power to “appoint ambassadors, Supreme Court judges and all other Officers of the United States”, with the “Advice and Consent of the Senate.” (US Const. Art. II, sec. 2, 2) Finally, he was given the power to “fill up all Vacancies” that occur when congress is in recess. (US Const. Art. II, sec. 2, 3)

The President has come to have numerous roles, such as “Head of State”, “Head of Government” and “Chief Diplomat”. “Head of State” or “Chief of State” is mainly a ceremonial position where the President serves as the symbolic leader of the country. (Watts 76) As “Chief Diplomat” the President is the face and voice of America to the rest of the world and oversees foreign policy. The role of “Commander in Chief” gives the President to power to control the entire military, though the power to declare war still lies with the congress. (Watts 77) The President is also referred to as the “Chief Diplomat” and as such he recommends measures to Congress and often the State of the Union address forms the backbone of that year’s Congressional agenda. (Watts 78).

Ultimately, presidential power is the power to convince and persuade. (Shapiro, Kumar, and Jacobs 3) On the other hand, as succinctly stated by Duncan Watts in The American Presidency,

Presidential power is constrained by the terms of the Constitution and various political considerations, yet presidents from Washington onwards have found means of circumventing these restrictions. In their defense, they have relied on the inherent powers in the office that many commentators detect in the original document. (Watts 202)

As set forth above, the position of president of the United States is one that is hard to define with any real accuracy. The wording of the Constitution is vague, limited and subject to interpretation. Much of what the president does is implied by the position itself. The powers appear to contract and expand depending on events and issues of the time and the personality of the President himself.

Works Cited

Davis, James W. The American Presidency. 2nd ed. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995.

Jones, Charles O. The Presidency in a Separated System. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1994.

Monroe, Amalia L. “American Presidential Power: A Research Guide.” Reference & User Services Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 2 (2008), pp. 122-127.

Shapiro, Robert Y. Martha Joynt Kumar, and Lawrence R. Jacobs, eds. Presidential Power: Forging the Presidency for the Twenty-First Century. New York: Columbia UP, 2000.

US Const. Art. II, sec. 2.

Watts, Duncan. The American Presidency. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009.