The Powers of the Executive Branch

The powers of the Executive Branch, or otherwise the President, are spelled out in Article II of the Constitution; however Jeffery Tulis argues the point that there are two constitutional presidencies. The first one is the constitutional presidency that the Founding Fathers intended when they wrote the Constitution and it has changed little to none. The second is the informal version of the constitutional presidency that Woodrow Wilson devised and that the majority of Presidents since have followed (Nelson, 2009, p1.). He argues in his thesis that as a result of these two constitutional presidencies that, “many of the dilemmas and frustrations of the modern presidency may be traced to the president's ambiguous constitutional station, a vantage place composed of conflicting elements"(Nelson, 2009, p.1).
When thinking about the Executive Branch and the Presidency it is important to remember that the framers where charged with creating a whole government and not just one part. Their main goal was to create a limited government that would protect individual rights and freedoms. The world at that time was dominated by monarchs and dictatorships and having come from such a country they were especially worried of a powerful executive whose power came from came from the role of a popular leader (Nelson, 2009, p.1). The founders framed the Executive Branch so that it would be independent in order to avoid temporary delusions of the public. They knew that the masses could be fickle from day to day and wanted to avoid this; so instead of drawing its power from the people the Executive Branch draws its power from the constitution. They also created the Executive to be independent of Congress, kind of pitting the two against each other in way (Nelson, 2009, p.10)
Woodrow Wilson would completely change the way people viewed the Presidency. In the early stages of his career Wilson had a traditional view of the Constitution. He believed that its meaning did not change over