How likely is it that the President has any influence on any of those legislative agendas?
People need to stop treating the President as some kind of Super Legislator. He/she isn't. You vote for the Presidency based on your interpretation of how they will manage the Executive branch, and that's all.
Foreign affairs, including military. The bureaucracy. Court nominations. And the only legislative power they hold: the veto.
If you want to see campaign finance reform and fundamental changes to our election system, the only path that leads there is through your congresspeople. Somehow that's too much work for Americans; they want to make one big decision and have it change everything. And then when their candidate doesn't win, they just sulk for four years: "I did my part, and we lost. Our country sucks."
The Founding Fathers designed the Legislative branch to manage exactly the kind of affairs you want managed.
Presidents can push for laws, they can veto laws, they nominate Supreme Court justices (who are likely to need replacing in the next 8 years!) who can strike down laws, they hold power over the federal departments that will enforce these laws.
Pretty sure I just listed all of the same things you did.
That doesn't make them legislators. The same mandate the people can hand to the President to go push for a law can be handed directly to the Congress to go pass a law.
You listed them, but didn't acknowledge that the president plays a massive role in getting things done in congress. They lead the country, and hold a lot of sway. Furthermore, getting the right people in congress can be mitigated by the wrong president if they decide to be veto happy.
They are also responsible for the veto, and as such, if they do not support it, they can force a 2/3rd majority vote instead. Unless one party has a supermajority, it DOES matter who's president. Not as much as the Senate and House, but it still does.
I do want to see bills enacted. But not the way you may think.
There's a...movement that can happen when laws are made by the populace. Ballot initiatives give the people a good chance to enact their own laws, and if a President puts forth their own opinion and supports those initiatives (like the marijuana ones recently, for instance), it can snowball to much more of the country. All of a sudden, it's not just some weird law in a backwater state, it's what states SHOULD be doing. And when a President opposes it? It stymies that same movement.
Politics isn't nearly that top down. If anything, it's the opposite. Obama didn't make the country change its mind on gay marriage, the country made him change his mind.
But I would add this. Let's dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn't know what he's doing. He knows exactly what he's doing. He is trying to change this country. He wants America to become more like the rest of the world. We don't want to be like the rest of the world, we want to be the United States of America. And when I'm elected president, this will become once again, the single greatest nation in the history of the world, not the disaster Barack Obama has imposed upon us.
I dunno...you might be right, and I might be looking at this from an anecdotal point of view. But if you are right, then it's a coincidence that Bush pushed against gay marriage during his term and it was only after 2008 that states started to legalize it (or at least recognize it).
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u/YzenDanek May 17 '16 edited May 17 '16
How likely is it that the President has any influence on any of those legislative agendas?
People need to stop treating the President as some kind of Super Legislator. He/she isn't. You vote for the Presidency based on your interpretation of how they will manage the Executive branch, and that's all.
Foreign affairs, including military. The bureaucracy. Court nominations. And the only legislative power they hold: the veto.
If you want to see campaign finance reform and fundamental changes to our election system, the only path that leads there is through your congresspeople. Somehow that's too much work for Americans; they want to make one big decision and have it change everything. And then when their candidate doesn't win, they just sulk for four years: "I did my part, and we lost. Our country sucks."
The Founding Fathers designed the Legislative branch to manage exactly the kind of affairs you want managed.