Can that downhill slide be avoided? Have we reached the point
where the president starts his inevitable slide downhill? I
don't mean President Reagan in particular; I mean any American
president? Political scientists study the phenomenon, and what
some call "the cycle of declining influence" is associated with
the separation of powers. Students of America don't agree on it:
it doesn't always happen. The United States is the only big
country that separates the executive from the legislative power.
Nowhere else can the legislature vote a higher budget than the
executive proposes; if Parliament did that in Ottawa, or
Amsterdam, or Canberra, the government would fall. Americans
feel they have the best system of government if the world and it
has worked pretty well on the whole. Now we have another test
under Mr. Reagan.Skip to next paragraph Subscribe Today to the
Monitor The argument of those who criticize the system is that
the US president "does not have the power to legislate and
execute his program," in the