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Some Thoughts on the Veto
Black, Charles
Black, Charles
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Abstract
The American Presidency has exercised an enormous fascination on the minds of historians and political theorists. The result has been an immense literature, with currents and cross-currents of tendency, with evaluation countering evaluation, View neutralizing view. This literature, and particularly its historical component, is often recurred to for the ascertainment of the correct view of presidential power, or for arguments leading to what someone is putting forward as the correct view. This is as it should be. But to me the literature on the Presidency-and most emphatically the historical part-teaches a larger and more general truth. Questions about presidential power have in the past produced different answers in different minds; one can conclude that our own received views are self-evidently right only if one is willing to assert that such minds as those of Madison and J.Q. Adams could not see the obvious, as to something closer to them than to us. I would make the contrary assertion. The history of presidential power is a history of the resolution of doubtful questions that remain doubtful; it is not, as I think some would make it, a history of the gradual acceptance of evident truth. It is a history of the molding and remolding of material of high plasticity, still plastic today. For there is no reason to think that that material suddenly froze hard around about 1950.