“Jackson was the first President to advance the theory that the President was the representative of the people and that a mandate from the ballot box warranted his intervention in the legislative process,” wrote the scholar C. Perry Patterson in 1947, two years after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, a president who had adopted a Jacksonian view of the White House’s power. Jackson, Patterson said, had “asserted that the veto was a legislative power given to the President without directions or limitations, and that the President was even more competent than the Congress by virtue of his national
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