The Presidency Powers Up.

• Author: KELLEY, TIMOTHY

The nation's top job isn't defined by the Constitution alone. It has been shaped by 212 years of experience --and five key events.

The Founding Fathers were a far-sighted bunch, but they didn't see Air Force One coming.

When leaders gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to draw up a blueprint for the infant United States government, they knew one person had to be in charge. They made the President the Commander in Chief of the military, and gave him the authority to negotiate treaties and appoint ambassadors and judges. But they could not foresee the full array of powers that the President has today, any more than they could anticipate his lavish 747 jet.

Any political office is partly what custom makes it. The presidency has been shaped, over time, by the 42 men who have held it and the issues they have faced. Here are five key moments in the evolution of the job:

SAYING NO TO CONGRESS

President Andrew Jackson (1829-1837), a Democrat, was sick in bed one day in 1832 when he got bad news. Congress had voted to renew the charter of the Second Bank of the United States, a private corporation in which the government kept its deposits. Jackson thought the bank was a "monster" that favored the rich. He declared that the bank was "trying to kill me--but I will kill it!"

The weapon Jackson proposed to use was the veto, a device that lets the President stop a bill passed by Congress from becoming law--unless the veto is overridden by a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate. The veto was in the Constitution, but its authors had expected its use to be rare. Alexander Hamilton had written in The Federalist, a series of letters urging adoption of the Constitution:

The superior weight and influence of the legislative body in a free government and the hazard to the executive in a trial of strength with that body afford a satisfactory security that the negative [veto] would generally be employed with great caution ...

The first six Presidents had used the veto sparingly, and usually only when they thought a bill was unconstitutional. But not Jackson. He rose from his sickbed and issued a thundering veto message, based not only on constitutional grounds, but also on his view that the bank was "a monopoly ... at the expense of the public." The bank's president called the message "a manifesto of anarchy," and Kentucky Senator Henry Clay tried to use the issue against Jackson in the presidential election. But the people stood with Jackson, and he made good...