Skowronek’s model estimates a president’s capabilities base upon the political time in which they find themselves in relation to the predominant political structure of the time. This model is extremely effective, but has come under fire for seemingly writing-off the personal qualities of a president. This is a gross misrepresentation of Skowronek’s work and findings. Whilst a president’s personal abilities are integral to how they accomplish their goals and perform their job, what goals they are able to accomplish and the estimation of their performance are far more dependent upon their position within the political cycle of the rise, reign, decay, and fall of regimes.

What a president is able to accomplish rests upon the environment in which they find themselves in power. If a president comes to office in the midst of a disaster that challenges the established social and political order in ways it cannot match, that president will be capable of much more profound change through restructuring in order to meet the challenge they face than a president in better times. President’s seeking to change the social and political order in moments where it has not yet gone into wane end up ineffectual due to their place in history, as seen by many a president rendered moot by their placement in the cycle, such as Nixon, Andrew Johnson, or Wilson.

This is not to say that a president’s personality has absolutely no bearing on a situation. President’s are still obviously autonomous actors within their political contexts. The problem with Greenstein’s rebuttal is that it misreads Skowronek’s theory as robbing agency from a president in favor of the time they inhabit. In fact, a president and their personality have a dramatic effect on the cycle of political time, either lengthening or shortening the established regime based upon their efforts. It is simply that their efforts are situated in relation to the period that they are in that constrains what they are able to do. A president may take up the process of articulation with gusto or preside over the end of a regime with tremendous tumult, but, as Skowronek elucidates, the end result remains the same.

As Maltese presciently puts it, “Anyone who witnessed the process used to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of Antonin Scalia […] would be hard pressed to argue that the president has too much power” in the process of judge selection. As laid out in Hamilton’s Federalist No. 76, the original conception of the Constitution gave the president the majority of the power to stock the judiciary due to the singular nature of the Executive lending it to be better directed in the decision process. Even then, though, Congress was allowed a voice in the process to check the large say that the president was, purposefully, given. In recent years, however, the Legislature, not the Executive Branch, has subsumed an inordinate amount of power over the process, creating unprecedented chaos across the judicial nominating process.

Since the turn of the 21st Century (though the ball got rolling even earlier in the 80s) gridlock and partisanship has increasingly interfered in the process of judicial nomination, creating numerous constitutional crises as a result of the Legislature’s increasingly-manipulative hand in proceedings. Though the Constitution gave the Legislature power to confirm the president’s picks, the Senate has increasingly abused this power to block judicial picks from even being discussed. This is not a proper use of their powers; indeed, it is the ultimate abdication of their ability, as it utterly destroys the president’s ability to make judgments. This can be seen in Chief Justice Roberts plea in 2010 for the process to be repaired, as the Senate’s meddling had plunged the judiciary into unprecedented chaos with vacancies proliferating across the country. With the legislature’s removal of the filibuster in cases of judicial decision in particular, the right to make appointments has been returned to the president and both Trump and Biden have been able to return to a normal rate of nomination. That being said, the frankly shameful acts of the legislature, particularly in the debacle around Merrick Garland’s non-nomination, have irrevocably harmed the institution of judicial appointment by creating a dangerous precedent that the Senate may simply ignore their responsibility under the Constitution to fill the bench. The Legislature, rather than the Executive, is far too powerful in the realm of Judicial appointments.

As a result of the copious conflicts which the US has found itself mired in since the end of World War Two, many have looked for someone to blame for the chaotic and most-often deleterious conflicts. People often turned to the president who, as a result of the expansion of the office since FDR, has accrued power in many areas, including that of military capability. One must be careful, however, not to take this expansion of power for a usurpation of Congress’ powers. To do so would be to define Congress as an unwilling and unwitting participant in the exchange, whereas Congress was very much complicit in expanding the president’s capabilities, yet still holds tremendous power over the president’s power to make conflict.

The world has changed dramatically since the inception of the president’s role as Commander-in-Chief. Whereas war was once something which, though destructive, could be approached with a fair amount leisure with the benefit of time, with the coming of the nuclear age the importance of the decision-making process (and the time involved) was exacerbated. The president is in an utterly-unparalleled position to understand and respond to conflicts, and the efforts taken throughout the 20th Century in order to expand the Executive’s power by both them and Congress recognized this. With this in mind, Congress still has an immense amount of power over how the president operates themself in relation to war, as Bauer points out. To look at the record and point to the few times over the past century where the president overstepped their bounds is to ignore the numerous other times when Congress’ influence kept things in check. Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Trump all had instances where they potentially could have moved into deadly conflicts, but Congress’ constitutional power over war, equipped with the power to defund or outright end conflicts, kept things in check. If the president truly had a monopoly over war, the United States could very well have found itself in far more conflicts than we did.

The Electoral College was an ineffective from its inception, and it’s honestly miraculous that it has functioned as a system for as long as it has, as Burdett Loomis is swift to point out. Schafer attempts to point out the subtler nuances of the college in his essay (none of which are particularly convincing, as many of the “problems” he cites, such as a greater number of candidates and choice, are, polarization aside, exactly what many reform advocates desire. His polarization argument should be even more frustrating to us Alaskans who, with our new Ranked-Choice system designed to decrease polarization, understand how to mitigate his problems with the very reforms he rails against), but utterly sidesteps the issue which is of the most import: that the Electoral College deliberately prioritizes some citizens and their right to vote above others. This disenfranchisement, above all else, is the key reason the Electoral College is unsupportable: it organizes our state-by-state voting into a caste system which disincentivizes engaging the entire US population, leading to a general malaise in the overall citizenry who believe, with good evidence, that their vote is inferior and doesn’t matter.

As Shafer demurred from discussing this aspect, I will examine the chief argument from detractors against my point, that being that in a truly democratic system, the candidates from major parties would appeal only to the states with the largest populations. Not only is this a clear problem under the EC system as well, as the the candidates are incentivized to appeal to a small number of smaller states instead, it is also utterly wrong. A popular vote system would make every vote integral, not just the votes of a singular state. It would increase turnout, incentivize broader campaigning as a counterbalance to the larger cultural-center states, and deliver on the promise that every men (and their rights) are created equal.