Senator Robert A. Taft on Conservative Government:
“Before our system [of free republican government] can claim success, it must not only create a people with a higher standard of living, but a people with a higher standard of character – character that must include religious faith, morality, educated intelligence, self-restraint, and an ingrained demand for justice and unselfishness.
In our striving for material things, we must not change those basic principles of government and of personal conduct which create and protect the character of the people….We cannot hope to achieve salvation by worshipping the god of the standard of living.”
Senator Robert A. Taft, “A Program for the Republicans,” 1944Robert A. Taft was among the last of the conservative Republicans in Congress, and strongly resisted the power-gathering tendency of the executive branch. His opposition to Truman’s assumption of presidential authority which did not exist recalls Jefferson Davis’s observation in 1881: “Of what value then are paper constitutions and oaths binding officers to their preservation, if there is not intelligence enough in the people to discern the violations; and virtue enough to resist the violators?”
Bernhard Thuersam,
DirectorCape Fear Historical Institute
Conservative Republican View on Inherent Powers:
“To prevent a steel strike, on April 8, 1952, [President] Truman directed the Secretary of Commerce to seize and operate nearly all the nation’s steel mills. The President’s executive order cited no specific statutory authorization, relying instead on “inherent” presidential powers allegedly invested in the President by the Constitution and “the laws of the United States.”
On April 15, Taft declared resoundingly that Truman’s policy was unconstitutional.
“What I object to is the President’s assuming the right to seize property when there is no statutory authority for him to do so…If he can seize the steel mills, I see no reason why he can’t arbitrarily seize men and draft them into the Army, as he proposed to do in 1946. …The dangerous doctrine of inherent powers has been floating around for a good many years, but there is in fact no authority for the existence of such powers….The vague theory that the President has inherent power by virtue of his office to meet a national emergency has no support in judicial decisions and runs counter to the sound and established principle that the President’s authority comes simply from the provisions of the Constitution and the laws passed by Congress….The Constitution says nothing about national emergencies, and if the President could increase his powers by such a declaration, there would be nothing left to the limitations largely imposed by the Constitution.”
Taft rejected wholly the theory of Theodore Roosevelt that the President, as “steward of the people,” may do “anything that the needs of the nation demanded unless such action was forbidden by the constitution and the laws.”
Taft concluded, “The present action of the President is in line with his general disregard of the provisions of the Constitution and laws of the United States. It follows the usurpation of the power to send American soldiers into Korea. It is in line with the general philosophy of [FDR’s] New Deal and [Truman’s] Fair Deal, that if there is any way to avoid coming to Congress for authority to act, it will be immediately adopted. I believe that the American people are determined that we return again to a government of laws rather than a government of men.”
(The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft, Russell Kirk and James McClellan, Fleet Press, 1967, pp. 96-98)
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