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CHAUTAUQUA — Under the U.S. Constitution, Congress is the most powerful of the three branches of government.

Yet because of the president’s growing power and authority, America elects the most powerful peacetime president every four years, says New York Times opinion columnist Dr. David French.

It’s tempting to react differently when different presidents expand presidential power. When a president you generally support expands presidential power, you’re tempted to be friendly. But when a president you generally oppose expands presidential power, you’re tempted to be skeptical.

However, this cannot be the yardstick for determining whether such an extension is constitutional or even correct.

French seemed to understand this when he asked his audience in the amphitheater on the morning of June 28 to think about presidential power in this way: The question was not whether you would want to give a certain power to a president you support, but whether you would be horrified if a president you do not support had that power.

It is not difficult to see that French’s point, although exaggerated and imperfectly formulated, is insightful.

This also involves America’s role as a leading country in the world over the past century, and the question of the extent to which America should bear the burden of world leadership.

This question was in the background when Dr. Kori Schake, senior fellow and director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, spoke to the morning audience in the amphitheater on July 8.

In the last sentence of her speech, Schake addressed America’s role as a world leader: “If you don’t like what is required of us to maintain a liberal, rules-based order, then I assure you: you will not be willing to bear the cost of overthrowing an order that our adversaries – the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, the North Koreans – would put in its place.”

Your statement is true, and certainly in a messy world there are tasks in which the United States should participate.

But it is one thing to understand that. It is another thing to understand that “should participate” does not mean “I usually have to do that.”

In other words, it is one thing to believe that the United States must bear the burdens of global leadership, including money and blood. But it is quite another to believe that the United States must bear the majority of those burdens.

Because as you, a loyal reader of this column, know, America is not the world police, nor should it be.

America has allies who, while not always enthusiastic enough, are able to bear their share of the burdens of world leadership – including money and blood.

Eight decades after the end of the Second World War, it is time – or actually high time – to distribute leadership responsibilities in the world more evenly.

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The debate over this treasure-and-blood issue does not follow party political lines in the United States.

Yet the 2024 major party presidential candidates are on different sides of the issue, as was heard during the September 10 televised candidates’ debate on Russia’s war against Ukraine. While Kamala Harris emphasized America’s support for Ukraine in the war, Donald Trump stressed that European countries should bear a greater share of the burden and what the Biden administration should have done to prevent the war in the first place.

These and other discussions during the presidential candidate debates on June 27 and September 10 were facilitated by three rules that the host networks CNN and ABC had rightly adopted:

≤ First of all, there is no studio audience that can break up into cheering sections.

≤ Second, increase the time limits to two minutes each for answers and reactions and to one minute for supplementary answers and reactions.

≤ Third, prevent candidates from interrupting each other—which is both tempting and rude—by keeping enough distance between them and turning off each other’s microphone when one is speaking.

Even if the third rule was not perfectly implemented on September 10, that was an implementation problem, not a rule problem. These three rules should continue to apply in such debates.

And the next time moderators try to correct one candidate during a televised debate, they should do the same for the other. On Sept. 10, the two ABC moderators tried multiple times to correct Trump, but never tried to correct Harris. This error temporarily transformed the Sept. 10 debate from a one-on-one duel into a three-on-one duel.

Given the network’s past tendency to favor Harris over Trump, it is understandable that such favoritism during a televised debate would make at least some of the audience suspicious.

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For more information on the 2024 presidential election, see the interview with Dr. Randy Elf from 0:15.10 to 0:17.10 of

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