Our overpowerful president

CHAPEL HILL -- Much has been made of Barack Obama's decision to appoint Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff. Some claim the appointment is hyperpartisan, indicating the president-elect intends to pursue an uncompromising liberal agenda. It isn't. Emanuel is a centrist and pragmatist, not an ideologue.

Others suggest, more accurately, that the action signals that the Obama administration will be guided by hard-nosed realism rather than ethereal idealism. If so, the significance of Emanuel's appointment is the message it sends to congressional Democrats, not Republicans -- better stay with the program.

Lost in the political calculation, however, is what Emanuel's acceptance says about our constitutional structure.

Emanuel is one of the most, if not the most powerful member of Congress. He hails from a safe district in Chicago and is virtually guaranteed re-election until retirement. Becoming speaker of the House is comfortably within his reach. Yet he leaves this behind to lead the White House staff -- a job with considerably less job security, far less autonomy and no independent constituency. Its offer instead is the allure of more power.

THE CONSTITUTIONAL FRAMERS WOULD HAVE BEEN SURPRISED BY THIS TURN OF EVENTS. Two hundred years ago, the Framers designed a government with three branches in order to constrain the power of each. In this way, as Madison famously wrote in Federalist 51, the "ambition" of one department could effectively counteract the ambition of another.

Madison did not believe that the branches were naturally co-equals. Rather, the playing field had to be adjusted to give each branch the "necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others." And the branch requiring adjustment was the legislative branch because it was then the most powerful. Thus, the Framers divided Congress into two houses so that the other branches would be protected "commensurate to the danger of attack."

Today, any suggestion that the legislative branch is more powerful than the executive, much less twice as powerful, would be immediately seen as a vestige of history. And a long outdated vestige at that. In 1952, Justice Robert H. Jackson noted "the gap that exists between the President's paper powers and his real powers" in a case addressing President Truman's seizure of the steel mills. Jackson warned that "the actual controls wielded by the modern presidential office" often cancel those who "are supposed to check and balance his power."

Presidential power has only further increased since Jackson. The need for government to act quickly in times of crisis, the centering of the president as the icon of national identity in popular culture and the executive branch's control of information, among other factors, have vested a power in the presidency that far surpasses that of the other branches.

Thus it becomes not surprising to see one of the most powerful members of Congress agree to become a White House staffer.

THE MORE SERIOUS QUESTION IS WHETHER A TRUE BALANCE OF POWER can be reconstructed. It needs to be. The Framers believed that an imbalance of power among the branches would inevitably lead to abuse and incompetence. The last eight years have proved them right. The Bush administration made constant claims to unlimited power that Congress had neither the will nor the ability to turn back. The resulting morass is history.

Whether an Obama administration will work to restore the constitutional balance is only speculation. The challenge is considerable. Checks and balances are inefficient, and ceding power to a coordinate branch is not easy, particularly when there are so many dire challenges facing the nation. But Emanuel's choice to accept the chief of staff position rather than continue in Congress vividly demonstrates how much the need to repair the constitutional structure is in order.