For some reason people are really hung up on this concept that the President’s power to dissolve the legislature would essentially have no limit in scope and could never turn out badly for the President.
I have thought of this, and like I said, the reality is that it doesn’t need specific limitations because it’s ludicrous to assume a President would just sit there and use it over and over again until he got the House he wanted. You would most definitely see a President who would essentially lose the ability to govern.
If you look back to the relationship between Kings George II and George III and their Parliaments you will see a similar situation, because the monarch had no limit on his ability to call for elections for a new Parliament. By and large Parliament still almost always won over the monarch, because the power to dissolve the legislature did not tend, in itself, to change public opinion in the monarch’s favor, and many times repeated attempts to change the composition of Parliament just lead to the King finally having to accept Prime Ministers they loathed.
The President absolutely needs a functioning Congress to pass budgets and do other things that are essential to his ability to run the country, if he kept the legislature essentially permanently in a state of limbo his own power to do anything would be very limited.
Further, the President already has several powers which in the “obnoxious case scenario” he could use extremely disruptively. I brought up the pardon power precisely because it is a power that the SCOTUS has ruled is essentially unlimited in scope and unchecked by any constitutional mechanism. I have not seen the pardon power as something that gets crazy, although there are always unfortunate end of Presidency pardons that do seem to happen.
The current veto power of the President requires 2/3rds majorities from both houses to overcome, and I would argue that it could be just as disruptive as continually dissolving the House if it were used constantly. What would happen to a President that constantly vetoed every single piece of legislation? Well, Andrew Johnson only vetoed a few things that the Radical Republicans wanted and he ended up impeached and while he survived the trial in the Senate he did end up politically marginalized. A President that was actually vetoing everything would probably have been convicted in the Senate.
I had sort of considered various alternative mechanisms like allowing the House to prevent its dissolution by passing some blocking legislation with some level of supermajority, but I just don’t think it is necessary. I don’t think people should dismiss the idea of how powerful the notion of “that just isn’t appropriate” is. Under the constitution of Canada, the Governor General could, as I understand it: Withhold assent for any legislation he wanted, with little ability of Parliament to override this, or dissolve or prorogue Parliament on a whim, with little ability of Parliament to stop it. The reason that does not happen is essentially tradition, and the fact that the people put into the position of G-G just aren’t the sort who would do such a thing. If they did, you would see a dramatic change to Canada’s constitution very quickly.
In any case, the reason to grant the power to dissolve the House is for him to use it in extreme scenarios. Is it possible that a President would use it in other scenarios, to his political benefit? Yes. However, such an act would not be without risks, and the fact that he could call new elections again and again to try and get bigger majorities in the House is dramatically undermined by the fact that such action would irreparably harm the Presidency. To me, the possibility is remote enough that the system does not need to be hard coded against it.
Instead, it should be dealt with the same way something as unlikely as a rogue monarch in the UK or Governor General in Canada would be handled: by immediate and dramatic constitutional changes, those positions have vast powers that are never exercised because the public would not stand for it. The Presidency has real power that the public expects will be wielded by the President, but it also has powers it expects the President to use sparingly and with discretion. This power would fall into that category and I do think that the system would self correct if a President went off the deep end with it, either through constitutional changes or impeachment. However, I don’t think it is good policy to limit the options on the table by creating various hard coded limitations on the power itself.