This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, September 10th, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

How did we get to the President of Today, a President who commands a bully pulpit and

claims powers never dreamed of in the Constitution.

Gene Healy, a vice president at the Cato Institute, and author of the cult of the presidency,

recently discussed the problematic modern presidency at Cato University on Capitol Hill.

So what happened to the to bring about this transformation to to create a situation in which all of the energy, all of the oxygen in the room and most of the

constitutional powers have ended up in the hands of the executive branch.

One of my colleagues at Cato, John Samples, who I think many of you heard from last week,

insist that whenever you see a problem with the current American system of

government and you're looking for someone to blame you're pretty safe

blaming the progressives of the early 20th century.

And that's certainly true in this case.

Herbert Crowley, the first editor of the New Republic,

described Teddy Roosevelt as a sledgehammer

in the cause of national righteousness.

And that perfectly captures the progressive view of the presidency.

The progressives quite openly opposed the framers system of checks and balances and the

small R Republican norms that kept the president from being a dynamic populist leader.

For the progressives it was a president's job to move the masses to unite them behind

calls for more executive power and to cede those powers in order that they could carry out the necessary reforms.

The smartest of the progressives recognize that you couldn't change American political culture without a sustained

...