Alternate Nostril Breathing.....

Hillary Clinton has slowly been normalizing her return to public life following 2016's stunning presidential election outcome. Her new book, aptly titled "What Happened," includes many depressing details about the tumult of 2016 and her personal struggles in the year since. In a recent interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper about the book, she also revealed that one of the techniques she had tried as a means centering and calming herself was the practice of alternate nostril breathing.

I have, of course, expressed a growing level of angst about the Trump Administration as its first year in office comes to a close. It seems a little goofy, but since it seemed to work for Mrs. Clinton, I thought I'd give it a go.

It wasn't helpful.

I probably wasn't doing it right; sort of like my experience with yoga a few years back. Just not my cup of tea.

Of late, I have sought more and more comfort from a different source; the Federalist Papers. I've written here before about my admiration for what Madison and Hamilton wrote in New York newspapers more than 220 years ago in the midst of the ratification debate. However, those musings were more of an attempt to understand the political paralysis that frustrates so many observers of American politics. Whether it's foreigners or Americans themselves, the perpetual inability to get things accomplished is most often depicted as a sign of impending doom for the entire system. Yet, as I repeated over and over again, Madison (especially) and Hamilton largely designed it that way.

The whole point of America's infamous "checks and balances" at the federal level, and replicated inside each of the 50 states, is to thwart the concentration of power, to pit "ambition against ambition," and short-circuit the "mischiefs of faction" that Madison worried could undermine everything. It is a system that is incredibly open, with multiple points of entry into different branches and levels of government. It's a system that rewards organization, virtually ensures countervailing forces will organize against you, and necessitates messy compromise. That might seem an odd thing to say in an era of hyper-partisanship and the virtual absence of anything that looks like compromise. Yet, whereas just a few years ago the failure to compromise, the inability to make progress on many issues, and the paralysis in policy-making were-- for some-- signs of the apocalypse, many of those same people probably see more virtue in it all than ever.

The fact is, wherever I look in the Trump Administration these days, I see the Federalist No. 10 and No. 51 in action. In his first year in office, President Trump has crashed spectacularly into the standard problems all presidents encounter. The main difference for Trump is that he's compounding them with a potent combination of navel-gazing narcissism and staggering incompetence.

For normal presidents, the fundamental dilemma facing them is that they have too little authority to satisfy public expectations of their performance. If you read Madison's thinking about this in the Federalist, and quickly peruse Article II of the U.S. Constitution, you'll quickly realize how true this is. On its face, Article II powers are pretty minimal. Indeed, there's a strong argument to be made that Madison and company thought of the U.S. president in largely ceremonial terms. "Commander in Chief" is pretty important, but Congress is in charge of raising and financing the troops under the President's control? There are some foreign affairs duties assigned to the President, but they all come with important limitations; ambassadorial appointments and treaty-making functions all require Senate approval.

I am not arguing that American presidents are weak figures. Indeed, throughout the course of American history, presidents have had a very liberal reading of the meaning of Article II's "Executive power" to do all kinds of things and effectively expand presidential authority and influence. Trump can clearly do a lot of harm; he's got his finger on the nuclear button, is sabre rattling with North Korea, and just today made moves to undo the nuclear deal with Iran.

For a variety of practical reasons, U.S. presidents have assumed responsibility for broad swaths of American foreign policy, including many duties ostensibly reserved for Congress under Article I, Section 8's "enumerated powers." Yet, presidents have to be cautious with the exercise of power. Power isn't static nor is it without limits, particularly within a U.S. system which gives comparatively little nominal or statutory power to the president, and sets up all sorts of other actors looking to undermine presidential power. The kind of power presidents need to get things done must be carefully cultivated and wielded judiciously or risk having it eviscerated away by other parts of Madison's original design.

President Trump swept into office after one of the craziest, most surprising campaigns in American history. In his first couple of weeks in office, President Trump signed all kinds of Executive Orders designed to get the ball rolling on parts of his agenda. Many of them reversed Executive Orders put in place by the Obama Administration. Trump has withdrawn from the Trans Pacific Partnership, threatened to scrap the NAFTA, and hectored the South Koreans into revisiting the U.S.-Korean Free Trade Agreement. He has initiated a travel ban from several Muslim-majority countries, threatened not to implement the 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement, and threatened to cut the budgets of key executive branch agencies-- State, EPA, Interior-- he doesn't like. All serious and deeply troubling.

Feelin' the Love Last Spring....

Yet, to get anything big done, Trump needs some friends on Capitol Hill; he needs legislation. Unlike parliamentary systems, the only two elected officials in cabinet are the President and Vice-President, neither of which sits in the legislature. In the United States, party discipline is a faint shadow of what it is in parliamentary systems, and the President, while the most prominent member of their political party has virtually no authority over those within their party elected to Congress.

For a time, Republicans on Capitol Hill probably felt they owed part of their own electoral victories to the phenomenon that Trump became on the campaign trail. Yet, many of those same members have always had reservations about Trump, a number probably want Trump's job in 2020.

Getting Congress to go along with White House policy priorities is a bit like herding 535 kittens (100 in the Senate, 435 in the House); it requires a near-constant persuasive offensive on the part of White House staff, and the President himself. Where presidential priorities are concerned, the most effective White House's behave more like a "legislators in chief," frequently drafting legislation that reflects those priorities, and then seeking sponsors on Capitol Hill to shepherding them through committees, amendment, and final votes. All the while, Presidents and their staffs are monitoring the proceedings, paying recalcitrant Members visits, making promises in exchange for their support, or sometimes exerting a little not-so-friendly pressure.

President Obama was terrible at this; probably one of the biggest reasons ObamaCare is where it is today. But Trump is even worse at all of this. His main tactic seems to be using Twitter to critique legislative initiatives on healthcare or taxes he hasn't bothered to read. Moreover, if he wants anything done about immigration, infrastructure, or his ridiculous border wall, he's going to need support from some of the same people he's been excoriating.

For a stark contrast with both of these leaders, just listen to parts of the Lyndon Johnson Tapes. Therein, you will hear a master-manipulator calling recalcitrant Members of Congress about their lack of support for his priorities. President Johnson was alternatively persuasive, abrasive, and crude with is former Hill colleagues, but he was brilliant in the way he wielded carrots and sticks to get his way.

As Trump racks up failures, many of which are own-goals, his influence and "power" over his agenda are beginning to wane. In short, President Trump has failed to cultivate and preserve the limited power he had in his sails on Election Day in 2016. Presidents have always been uniquely positioned to appeal to the entire country, rally support, and pursue their agendas. Who else has a 747 to fly around in? Who else can request national television time to pitch their ideas to voters? Who else in the country can serve as "consoler-in-chief" in times of national crisis (hurricanes, mass shootings, etc)? What about the role of an American president as "leader of the free world?"

None of this happens or resides fully within the control of U.S. presidents unless it's actively maintained, cultivated, and wisely exercised. Trump is quickly squandering what little of this power he had. Waiting in the wings are a long list of actors in the American political system eager to marginalize the White House, undercut its power, and move a different agenda forward while they wait for the next president to be elected in 2020.

Few people imagined someone like Trump ever moving into the White House. But Madison and Hamilton did.

Whether Trump serves just four years or eight (a possibility I do not discount), I'll be leaving the alternate nostril breathing to Mrs. Clinton. At the moment I've got no plans to build a survival bunker in the backyard and hide for the next few years. Instead, my solace, my zen in the middle of all this chaos, will continue to come from the Federalist Papers.