The More Things Change: The Caesar of the West: Executive Orders, the Constitution, and Theodore Roosevelt


“They hate him, they hate him hard and hot, but they are as afraid of him as sudden death,” Irwin Norwood, 1909.

Ever since Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) accused President Barrack Obama of being “someone who wants to act like a king or a monarch,” other powerful and influential Republican leaders have piled-on Obama for expressing his Executive authority in an imperious manner. Tom Rice (R-South Carolina) compared the President’s barrage of executive orders to King George III’s “usurpations” of the rights of the American Colonists, and Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) vowed to remedy Obama’s “King-like” behavior by launching a tax-payer funded lawsuit against the President. “On one matter after another during his presidency,” wrote Boehner in a memo to House Members, “President Obama has circumvented the Congress through executive action, creating his own laws and excusing himself from executing statutes he is sworn to enforce—at times even boasting about his willingness to do it, as if daring the America people to stop him.”

By acting with the haughty abandon of a emperor, issuing Executive Order after Executive Order to implement his will Obama is usurping lawmakers’ Constitutional authority—or so goes the Republican claim—making the Legislative and Judicial branches of government increasingly irrelevant. These kinds of accusations have, of course, have been made about another President: Republican Theodore Roosevelt.

Early on in Roosevelt’s 7-½ year administration, Senators and Representatives—and much of the public—had had enough of his contravening Congress. Roosevelt seemed to have little regard for process, legal or otherwise, and began drawing criticism in 1903 about his failure to comply with the legal requirement of the Spooner bill—which mandated that he would begin negotiations with Nicaragua if no agreement about the Panama Canal could be reached with Colombia—Senator John Tyler Morgan (D-Alabama) blasted the President’s refusal to bring Nicaragua online as called for by the legislation as nothing short of “Presidential usurpation.”

In his speech on the same topic, Representative Hugh A. Dinsmore (D-Arkansas) declared to the House that evil times were ahead for the country if Roosevelt could so deliberately and shamelessly ignore the law. “Here’s the law. Did the President obey it? Everybody knows that he made no such pretence… Is he above the law?”

Dinsmore lamented that, “We have come upon evil times, when the executive power of the Government can usurp authority and cast aside the express with of Congress declared in law.” By refusing to act on the Spooner bill, Roosevelt was ignoring constitutionally dictated boundaries between the Executive, the Legislative, and Judicial branches and indeed violating the law. Roosevelt seemed to have the temperament of an emperor, acting like the Caesar of the West.

The Nation, in January of 1904 reported that lawyer Henry Loomis Nelson, “writing from close observation, has declared that President Roosevelt has essentially a lawless mind. That is, he thinks only of what he wants done, and has a thoroughgoing contempt for everything, including the law and the testimony, that stands in his way…”

By 1907, comments like those written in the Bisbee Arizona Daily Review were commonplace. “If the president takes with the next congress the high and lofty ground he has with taken with this one, it is not without the bounds of possibility that the house may impeach him,” stated the writer. “The President’s fantastic notions of his powers under the constitution have carried him too far along the dangerous road of centralization…”

Upon the eve of Roosevelt’s departure from the White House in March of 1909, journalist Irwin Norwood summed up Roosevelt’s general relationship with the Constitution. “Mr. Roosevelt, as President,” continued Norwood, “was as careless with the constitution as with language, and the constitution, up to the time he began to finger it, was considered something of a comprehensive document and is still looked upon by most people as the last word in the fundamentals of government by the people. But Roosevelt often found that document… very much in his way… His performances that were without a shadow of authority in law… are in truth too numerous to set down.”

In his autobiography, Roosevelt wrote that what some people called "usurping authority and acting in an unconstitutional manner" were simple good leadership practices. In taking Panama, he acted no differently that Thomas Jefferson had when he signed the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. "By far the most important action I took in foreign affairs during the time I was President", wrote Roosevelt, "was related to the Panama Canal." He realized that "there was much accusation about my having acted in an 'unconstitutional' manner" — a position, he asserted that could only be maintained by critics if Thomas Jefferson was likewise indicted. Both he and Jefferson—whom Roosevelt actually loathed—were engaged in exercising “efficient authority.” One wonders if Barrack Obama—a fan of quoting Theodore Roosevelt—might with some confidence, lay a similar claim before the public in his post-Presidential autobiography?

The more things change, the more they stay the same…