Managing the Presidency: Keys to Power
Question 1
The long term fallout of the 1876 election in the South is that the frontrunner of the popular votes was not selected as the president. The consequence of this was that the nation had no idea who the president would be till the 2nd of March, 1977. Two individual slates of electors were sent from Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida to the Congress. A special commission was created due to the fact that the two separate slates of electors could not come to an agreement on which of the slates was lawful. The commission was made up of five Senators, five Representatives and seven Republicans. David Davis, the independent Chief Justice intended to preside over the commission (Pfiffner, 2010).
Davis was appointed by Illinois as the senator; hence Republican Justice Joseph Philo Bradley replaced him and afterwards voted with other republicans to give a total of twenty disputed votes to the Republican candidate. As a result, Rutherford Hayes was given 185 to 184 triumphs in the vote count as well as the needed majority to win the presidency. 4,300,590 million popular votes to 4,036 298 cast for Hayes, were won by Democrat Samuel Tilden. Therefore the president emerged to be the runner-up in the popular vote with 264,292 few votes compared to his competitor.
Democrats came to an agreement of not challenging the presidential vote further in exchange for a pact with Hayes to terminate the Reconstruction and do away with the carpetbag Republican governments that were from the Southern states. Disenfranchisement of African Americans in the South over the next decades as well as the development of the solid south for the Democratic part were the eventual result of this delivery of political power in the South to the Democrats(Warshaw, 2005).
Question 2
Despite the fact that the Electoral College occasionally fails to reflect the will of the people, passing of an amendment to replace the organization has been extremely difficult. Supporters of the Electoral College system claim that it is among the main bulwarks of the United States’ multiparty system. In this system, the party is the one that chooses the electors based on loyalty. This is contrary to the popular election system where it is extremely hard for leaders of a given party to force their supporters to vote for an individual with whom the candidate made a deal, even in a case where one minor party wins a significant portion of the vote and there is a runoff election (Pfiffner, 2010).
Critics of direct popular vote further claim that it results to endless challenges and recounts. Supporters of this system have however claimed that the probability of recounts is small. This is because there has to be the reasonable possibility that sufficient fraudulent or incorrect votes that could change the outcome for there to be a recount. In the Electoral College system, few votes in a single state may greatly alter the electoral outcome. This situation was witnessed in the year 2000 in Florida presidential election.
Al Gore was forced to look for many hundreds of votes for the outcome to change. George Bush would have been forced to find votes exceeding 500,000 if the election had been by popular vote. It is thus unlikely that the Electoral College system will be amended in the near future given the difficulty of passing a constitutional amendment and the complexity and uncertainty of any alternative electoral system (Warshaw, 2005).
Question 3
Presidents nominate men and women to be the heads of departments, hoping that they will carry out presidential policies. However, there is no guarantee that they will carry out these policies. First of all, these secretaries may have diverse priorities to the president once they are nominated to various positions. Moreover, it is extremely difficult to know the interest groups that influence people who are nominated in the executive office by the president.
Rather than the president being the head of the Executive branch with people who strictly heed to his orders, the Executive departments play the role of providing the president with simple and fast solutions to various inquiries. There is a possibility that some solutions provided by these departments would be against the wishes of the president (Warshaw, 2005).
There is a group that makes up the Federal Bureaucracy, which has the ability to oppose the president. The president has a restrained control over this group. For this reason, a president could realize that his instructions or policies have simply not been carried out. The members of the Federal Bureaucracy might ignore the policies set by the president due to their association with specific interest groups or due to aligning themselves to authoritative forces present in the Congress. The size of the Executive staff has been increasing with time, an indication that a president can never be sure that it will carry out the intended policies. From these reasons, it is clear that there is no guarantee that people nominated as department heads will carry out presidential policies (Warshaw, 2005).
References
Pfiffner, J. P. (2010). The Modern Presidency (6th Ed). Cengage Learning, Chapters 2 and 4
Warshaw, S. A. (2005). The Keys to power: managing the presidency. Person Longman
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