The Passage of Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #4)

by Robert A. Caro

Even should Congress wish to, it can’t get around that barrier. “Any formal allocation of power to the Vice President would conflict with the clause in the Constitution vesting the undivided ‘executive power’ in the President,” stated one study of the situation. There was, moreover, a further barrier. The various great departments of government—not only the Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Interior, all the departments whose heads sat as the President’s Cabinet—but other major if non-Cabinet-level federal agencies as well had been established by law: by statutes enacted by Congress. In establishing these departments, Congress had laid out boundaries, statutory boundaries, of their authority. Powers delegated to a Vice President by a President might infringe on those statutory powers. This conflict—and the weakness of the Vice President’s role in it—had become clear during a President’s attempt to give his Vice President what was accurately called “the only big job ever handed a Vice President” during the almost two centuries the United States had been in existence: the executive order that Franklin Roosevelt issued in July, 1941, after, with war looming, he had declared a state of national emergency. “By virtue of the existence of the emergency,” he created an Economic Defense Board to coordinate planning for the looming war with broad powers over areas such as imports, exports and the stockpiling of strategic materials, and made Vice President Henry A. Wal...