![]() Former President Trump’s approval rating continued to fall during the pandemic because he refused to take any action at all. When faced with public health crises, we expect the president to do something, even if we don’t always agree about the extent of presidential action. How, then, do we define dereliction of duty in the 21st century? On some issues, we’ve departed a great deal from the framers’ vision for the presidency. Roosevelt, Americans repudiated Hoover’s approach and voted for Roosevelt by overwhelming margins. In the 1932 presidential election between Hoover and Franklin D. While the president’s oath doesn’t mention economic crises, voters clearly concluded Hoover’s inaction was a dereliction of duty. He did implement limited measures but rejected direct payments to citizens and refused to order a bank holiday to stem the bank failures. President Herbert Hoover was a traditional conservative and opposed extensive federal intervention in the Great Depression. Just 20 years later, Americans had very different expectations for the president during an economic crisis. But Americans didn’t blame him for failing to address the pandemic, and instead focused on local measures to combat the illness. President Woodrow Wilson left the crisis to the states to manage. For example, in 1918 to 1919, the Spanish Flu pandemic ravaged the nation, but public health was still a local issue. Over the next 230 years, our expectations have expanded and evolved, sometimes slowly. The city tried to institute a quarantine and later adopted measures to improve the water conditions around the wharf, but there was no consideration of a federal policy. When Philadelphia was slammed by a yellow fever outbreak in 1793, the federal government and most elite citizens simply left town. While they anticipated the president would be a man of character and virtue, they did not expect the president to address public health crises, or spearhead economic reform efforts. (Kidd/Governing)īeyond military defense, their expectations were much less clear. The town hall is the oldest in the country still in continuous use. The framers made clear, when it comes to military defense, that the buck stops with the president.ĭaniel Shays and leaders of his Massachusetts rebellion met at the Pelham Town Hall in 1787 to discuss their grievances against the U.S. Madison’s War,” as a nod to the president’s failure to defend the city. While much of the military blame belonged to the field commanders, critics dubbed the conflict “Mr. Especially after the British Army sacked Washington, D.C., and burned the White House and the Capitol. On the other hand, when James Madison failed to take an active leadership role in the War of 1812, he was widely criticized. Most Americans agreed with his decision - even the Republican newspapers that regularly criticized the president. After unsuccessfully pursuing peaceful solutions, President George Washington called up local militias and crushed the rebellion. For example, protests in western Pennsylvania against a whiskey excise tax turned violent when rebels burned down the home of a local tax collector in 1794. ![]() Fearful for their own safety, wealthy citizens in Boston finally raised the money to pay for a private military force and restore order.Īfter the Constitution was ratified, the framers applauded the presidents that defended the Constitution against any type of armed force and condemned those who fell short. Congress had been unable to raise the funds or forces to suppress the rebellion. The previous year, Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays and a group of rebels closed down the local courts in western Massachusetts in response to punitive tax measures. They also fully anticipated that the president would lead a response to a domestic insurrection, and they had good reason to create a powerful executive for that very scenario. Thinking of the British troops that had departed New York City just four years earlier, they certainly expected the president would rally the defenses if a foreign power invaded the country. In 1787, when the delegates at the Constitutional Convention crafted Article II of the Constitution, they penned the president’s oath of office. But what does that actually mean? Americans, past and present, expect the president to defend the country against physical attacks - but beyond that, we rarely agree, whether it be 1789 or 2021. Every president takes an oath of office to defend and protect the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic.
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