Why and how did Congress actively promote "the superiority of presidential government”?

Join CLEAR's Dr. William Resh in conversation with Dr. John Dearborn (Vanderbilt) about his book Power Shifts: Congress and Presidential Representation.

In Power Shifts, Dr. Dearborn shows that legislators acted on the idea that the president was the best representative of the national interest. Congress subordinated its own claims to stand as the nation’s primary representative institution and designed reforms that assumed the president was the superior steward of all the people. In the process, Congress recast the nation’s chief executive as its chief representative.