c. it enhances agenda setting – overwhelming empirics

One of the most important presidential strategies in the legislative arena is (trying) to set the agenda of Congress (see Wood 2009 for an extensive overview; Cohen 2012; Edwards and Wood 1999; Light 1999). The reasoning behind this is straightforward: Since presidents have only few tools at hand to sway lawmakers on how they cast their ballot, the focus of the White House is set at an earlier stage: by already influencing what is considered in the first place. Compared with the legislative prevalence of executives in parliamentarian democracies, presidents in the United States are clearly less able to dominate the agenda space. Yet based on his constitutional right to recommend legislation deemed necessary and appropriate (Art. II, Sec 3, U.S. Constitution), it is primarily the resources of the executive branch - i.e., the departmental bureaucracies, and the Executive Office of the President - which put the president into the position to exert policy leadership via drafting legislative proposals. Unmatched by any other single legislators or even Congress as a whole, John W. Kingdon is right to argue that “[…] no other single actor in the political system has quite the capability of the president to set agendas.” (Kingdon 2003, 24). Previous research has shown that defining the agenda is a promising strategy for the White House. Presidential initiatives, both major and minor ones, almost always find their way into the legislative hopper (Cameron and Park 2008, 51f; Cohen 2012, 24ff; Edwards and Barrett 2000, 116ff). Accordingly, legislation proposed by the administration makes up between 30% and 50% of the congressional calendar, while the remaining proportion is initiated by members of Congress, is based on recurring pieces of legislation, and are reaction to external events or imminent crises (Edwards and Barrett 2000, 112ff; Taylor 1998, 377ff; Theriault 2002). While this indeed makes the president the single most important agenda-setter, it also demonstrates that he does not dominate the legislative agenda of Congress (Sinclair 2006, 255–63). We can mainly identify three mechanisms how presidential agenda-setting affects the lawmaking process in Congress. First, it enables the president to define the boundaries of policies under consideration, and in this way to structure the following deliberation. In this sense, agenda setting is first and foremost about obtaining the Deutungshoheit - i.e., the prerogative of interpretation - over the policy debate through setting the terms of the debate, moving first on certain policy aspects, and via framing and priming of core arguments (Edwards and Wood 1999; Eshbaugh-Soha and Peake 2005). George W. Bush, for instance, during his 2000 presidential campaign advertised his plans for massive across the board tax breaks which, at that time, were perceived as a mere “pipe dream” on both sides of the political spectrum (Milbank 2001). Cutting taxes, and especially to this extent, did not rank high among the priorities of lawmakers nor the American public. The arrival of Bush in the White House, however, completely changed the dynamics of debate. It put the tax cut proposal upfront of the legislative agenda during his first half year as president, and Democrats in the end had to accept an amount of tax breaks which came up to more than double of what they called reasonable six months before during the election campaign. Bill Clinton, on the other hand, was largely rolled by the issue dynamics in the debates regarding the overhaul of the Internal Revenue Service in 1997. Favoring only minor reforms, he had to concede early on to pressures from the public and Congress who, fueled by several major scandals, thirsted for a largescale reorganization of the IRS instead of a fine-tuning approach preferred by Clinton (Broder 1997). Of course, these are only two illustrations highlighting how presidents can succeed but also fail in setting the tone of the debate from early stages and through this pre-structure the outcome of the lawmaking process. Second, presidential leadership at the agenda-setting stage helps to overcome collective action problems within Congress and among its 535 legislators by providing a focal point around which other political actors’ policy positions can crystalize (Cameron and Park 2008; Cohen 2012; Neustadt 1991, 8f). The USA PATRIOT Act can serve as a prime example in this regard, on which the New York Times stressed that “[b]y and large, the House and Senate bills both use as a starting point a proposal sent to Capitol Hill nearly two weeks ago by the White House.” (Lewis and Pear 2001). Since lawmakers in Congress today only have scarce resources to draft their own bills, presidential input from the beginning is often highly appreciated. Yet, a proposal from the White House furthermore fulfills the role of first mover draft upon which the subsequent debate can be structured. In this sense, it both offers a distinct policy outline upfront and provides guiding posts for the further deliberation process. Third, agenda-setting offers the White House the opportunity to highlight its priorities, how they are distributed across various policy issues, and in which way policies should be packaged (Rudalevige 2005, 437ff; Wayne 2009b, 317ff). Because the resources of any administration to lobby Congress are not infinite and the multiple political arenas are usually heavily crowded with myriad policy items and problems striving to be solved, the White House needs to prioritize its policy agenda. This involves, among other things, to select some issues over others, decide about their sequencing, how to pursue them, and how much political capital it wants or needs to spend on any given item. Therefore, the administration will focus on certain policies with more attention, on others with less, depending on the prioritization by the president but also upon other considerations, such as the overall density of the policy agenda or imminent pressures of the time. The trick is to not overwhelm Congress with the president’s initiatives. As Lyndon B. Johnson famously quipped, “Congress is like a Whiskey drinker. You can put an awful lot of whiskey into a man if you just let him sip it. But if you try to force the whole bottle down his throat at one time, he’ll throw it up.” (cited in Rudalevige 2002, 113). Thus, the failure to prioritize easily leads to overload of Pennsylvania Avenue with Congress at the one end, and to excessive demands and exhaustion for the White House at the other end. The rocky start of the Clinton administration underlines this argument: since the White House did not pursue a ‘rifle-approach’ to define clear policy priorities for its initial months and then execute them, it got lost in numerous legislative battles and mine-fields early on in its first year. Instead it followed a ‘shotgun-approach’ by addressing as many issues as possible at once leading to an overkill and chaos (Rockman 1996; Sinclair 2000b).