Call him Queen Bee

FOR anyone who doubts that America is the land of the free, the ability of the Supreme Court to turn a question posed by a Pepsi distributor into a ruling that restricts presidential power ought to be reassuring. In NLRB v Noel Canning the court decided on June 26th that Barack Obama had acted unconstitutionally when he appointed people to the board of a federal agency while the Senate was technically still in session. That the decision was unanimous must have stung the constitutional law professor in the White House as much as it delighted Republicans. The day before the court’s decision, John Boehner, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, announced plans to sue the president for overreaching his authority and for enforcing laws selectively. “We elected a president,” Mr Boehner wrote to his colleagues. “We didn’t elect a monarch or king.”

If Mr Obama is the tyrant that his opponents allege then he seems to have a highly whimsical notion of how to use his power. The list of things he has left undone is long. It grew longer when Mr Boehner told the president last month that there would be no vote on immigration reform before the mid-term elections. The other side of the ledger has looked underwhelming ever since Republicans took control of the House in 2010. Mr Obama’s recent accomplishments include giving federal workers the right to request more flexible working hours and a federal strategy for the protection of bees. This being the Obama White House, the second of these came with a slightly spurious estimate of the contribution to the economy made by winged pollinators ($24 billion, or about a third of Amazon’s yearly revenue). Bees are important, but Mr Obama would not be so interested in apiarian workers if he were able to effect more change for the human sort.

Despite heaps of evidence to the contrary, the notion that the president calls the shots in American politics refuses to go away. Mr Obama, in this telling, could get much more done if he tried a bit harder to make deals with Republicans. The idea has its roots in the decades in the middle of the 20th century, from the New Deal programmes of the 1930s to the Great Society ones of the 1960s, when presidents did indeed get much of what they wanted. Collective memory is somewhat selective: both Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson enjoyed thumping majorities in Congress when they seemed at their most imperial. (Granted, the parties were less ideologically homogenous then. Johnson, a Democrat, faced fierce opposition from his own party when pushing his great civil-rights reforms, and needed all his arm-twisting skill to overcome it.)

Roosevelt and Johnson also benefited from some one-off changes. As the boarding houses near the Capitol where congressmen slept were knocked down and turned into offices, lawmakers moved their families to Washington, where their children went to school with each other and played tennis at weekends. They still disagreed about plenty but were more likely to trust each other. The Vietnam war and the introduction of regular flights back to constituencies ended all this. With hindsight, the dealmaking between Ronald Reagan (born 1911) and the Democratic Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill (born 1912), looks like its last great flowering, though Bill Clinton cut some good deals with Republicans, such as welfare reform. It would be nice if Mr Obama could do the same, but there is scant prospect of it.

History has built up unrealistic expectations of the presidency. Mr Obama has fed them by promising more than he can deliver. He began this year by vowing to use his pen and phone to get things moving if Congress would not co-operate. On July 1st he repeated himself. “We can’t wait for Congress to actually get going on issues that are vital to the middle class,” he said, pledging more executive actions, a kind of presidential decree that is limited in scope and can easily be overturned by a successor. It is hard to blame the president for exaggerating his powers a little: politics is a sales job. But he is adding to what Richard Neustadt identified in “Presidential Power” as the office’s main weakness: “the great gap between what is expected of a man (or someday a woman) and assured capacity to carry through”.

He’ll never be royal

If the conditions that once made presidents seem like emperors have disappeared, that ought to lead to a more limited form of government. Instead, America is left with the institutions devised in the middle of the 20th century but governed by a different strain of politics. Mr Obama’s attempt to bypass Congress when making appointments to federal agencies, which earned the Supreme Court’s rebuke, was provoked by the Senate’s refusal to confirm his proposed nominees, or even to consider voting on some of them. This has left important federal agencies, in areas from health care to immigration, with no confirmed bosses for long stretches of Mr Obama’s administration. The president has tried to get around this by sticking his people in position during recesses. Senate Republicans responded with make-believe sessions attended by a member who announces that the chamber is sitting and then adjourns it moments later, a tactic pursued enthusiastically by Democrats to thwart George W. Bush at the end of his second term.

The result is a system that only gets things done when the same party controls the presidency and both arms of Congress. “Being the minority used to mean that you shared a lot of interests, like a minority shareholder,” says Tom Davis, a former Republican congressman. “Now it means you are the opposition.” Despite the impression given by the Supreme Court and by Mr Boehner’s lawsuit, the monarch Mr Obama currently resembles is not George III but a queen bee: bigger than everyone else but not really in control of the hive and likely to be stung to death as her powers fade, to be replaced by another. Unfortunately the idea of the omnipotent president is harder to kill.