An article in the Alantic Monthly by Garrett Epps entitled “The Founders Great Mistake” offers some observations on weaknesses in the US constitution regarding the Presidency. In particular –
The most dangerous presidential malfunction might be called the “runaway presidency.” The Framers were fearful of making the president too dependent on Congress; short of impeachment—the atomic bomb of domestic politics—there are no means by which a president can be reined in politically during his term. Taking advantage of this deficiency, runaway presidents have at times committed the country to courses of action that the voters never approved—or ones they even rejected.
Epps offers several examples of runaway presidency. The example of Andrew Johnson is particularly good-
Andrew Johnson was the next unelected runaway. Politically, he had been an afterthought. But after Lincoln’s assassination, Johnson adopted a pro-Southern Reconstruction policy. He treated the party that had nominated him with such scorn that many contemporaries came to believe he was preparing to use the Army to break up Congress by force. After Johnson rebuffed any attempt at compromise, the Republican House impeached him, but the Senate, by one vote, refused to remove him from office. His obduracy crippled Reconstruction; in fact, we still haven’t fully recovered from that crisis.
Epps, a law professor at the University of Baltimore, points out the origin of the mysterious electoral college-
The system that the Framers developed for electing the president was, unfortunately, as flawed as their design of the office itself. When Madison opened discussion on presidential election in Philadelphia, he opined that “the people at large” were the “fittest” electorate. But he immediately conceded that popular election would hurt the South, which had many slaves and few voters relative to the North. To get around this “difficulty,” he proposed using state electors. Electoral-vote strength was based on a state’s total population, not on its number of voters—and the South received representation for three-fifths of its slaves both in the House of Representatives and in the Electoral College.
The electoral college was merely a scheme to manipulate the weighting of ballots in states with a low fraction of voters among the population. In other words, it was a “duct tape and baling wire fix” to accomodate the slave states embarrassingly low fraction of voting adults. This antebellum artifact should be abandoned in favor of simple vote counting.
The citizens of the USA need to have a better mechanism with which to fire a President who is crooked or incompetent. The provision for impeachment carries a high threshold for activation. A president must engage in some kind of serious malfeasance to provoke the congress to vote for impeachment. But the application of this provision has been very nonlinear. Clinton was impeached for lying about consensual sex. Bush arguably lied or at least tolerated falsehoods leading to the invasion of Iraq and the resulting civil war with tens of thousands of deaths. Depending on the congress for an even application of its powers is a sketchy proposition.
The framers of the constitution did not anticipate the situation where an incompetent president might be elected by “low-information voters”. A government that has usurped the consensus of the electorate and is allowed to remain in play because of a fixed period of tenure is a government that serves only itself. This is wrong and we should not stand for it.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
“A president must engage in some kind of serious malfeasance to provoke the congress to vote for impeachment”
You mean like a tryst with another adult of consenting age? Was that serious malfeasance?
Ok, maybe lack of good judgement, but not serious malfeasance.
Gauss, I am with you 100% on this, but you will need someone with the money of a Gates or Buffet to push it through.
Go for it.
Oops. Note to self, read whole post before commenting.
Well, this is the ‘change’ presidency. After 25% unemployment I’m sure we’ll all applaud Obamas calling out the national guard to quell civil unrest.
The democrats and republicans drink from the same filthy, bowel wrenching fecally tainted pond. They were elected to serve their corporate masters (see TARP). Although Barney Frank talks tough, mysteriously the bankers always get what they want. This notion that ‘the republicans block measures’ is crap. The democrats create measures they know will be blocked. They thus have political ‘cover’.
Obama will be Bush light . His economic plan cannot work because it is being implemented by corrupt govt officials.
THE ECONOMIC PLAN CANNOT WORK! IT WILL BE DOLLED OUT TO POLITICAL CRONEYS AND STOLEN
Hence your points on the constitution are well taken but near IMPOSSIBLE to implement given our broken government.
To say that the electoral college was put in place to assuage Southern slave states with lower populations is a gross rewriting of history. Slavery was not an issue in the 1780s, That really became powerfully a national issue fifty or so years later.
In the 1780s, the rural states were afraid of Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia forming alliances or voting blocs to control the other nine states, slave or non-slave. New Hampshire and Rhode Island were as fearful of this as South Carolina or Georgia were. They were giving up lots of power that the Articles of Confederation gave them. They were semi-autonomous nations and union under the Constitution was something that they feared. Issues like having to send tax revenues and men to fight wars with the Indians or Spanish far from their own states were devated in the smaller northern states.
The framers also knew that unfettered power of an executive was bad – that had been English rule. They just knew more recently that a powerful assembly was a bad thing, too. The Confederation was ineffective due to its inability to get anything done legislatively and through the ease of disunity of the states. Those drove the Constitution’s writers more than anything.