It’s time to dump Presidents’ Day - The Boston Globe

There are some really unnecessary and antiquated holidays — here’s looking at you, Bunker Hill Day — but Presidents’ Day takes the cake.

The executive branch of the federal government and the 46 men who have led it since 1789 are no more special, no more deserving of a holiday, no more crucial to the life of our constitutional republic, than the two other co-equal branches of government, the Congress and judiciary.

In fact, if we’ve learned anything over the last 232 years, and particularly the last four, it’s that the executive branch wields too much power, especially too much unchecked power, too easily and readily able to sidetrack Congress and circumvent, at least for a while, the judiciary.

So why are we celebrating it while routinely diminishing the importance of the two other co-equal branches of government?

Probably because we tend to celebrate celebrity more than the nation’s founding principles.

Presidents’ Day traces its roots to 1885, when the Feb. 22 birthday of George Washington, the nation’s first president, became a national holiday.

Some states celebrated Abraham Lincoln’s Feb. 12 birthday. In the late 1960s, Congress began debating the Uniform Monday Holiday Bill, which should have been named the Three-Day Weekend Bill, as it moved a number of federal holidays to Mondays. The idea was not only to create long weekends for the nation’s workers, but to reduce absenteeism linked to the ever-changing holidays, and to give retailers an excuse to hold sales.

During debate, it was suggested that Washington’s Birthday be renamed Presidents’ Day, so that celebrations of both Washington and Lincoln’s birthdays could be rolled into one and eventually was commonly seen as honoring all presidents.

That bill was signed into law in 1971 by Richard Nixon, who within a year had managed to turn the Oval Office into a racketeering operation, making it abundantly clear we should be wary of unduly glorifying any and all presidents.

While four presidents were born in February — Washington, Lincoln, William Henry Harrison, and Ronald Reagan — Presidents’ Day never falls on any of their actual birthdays because they are either too early or too late to coincide with the third Monday of the month.

Considering that we have just rid ourselves of a president who felt unbridled by the balance of powers, who cared nothing about one-half of the legislative branch and was emboldened to be even more disdainful of the entire Congress because the other half let him do whatever he wanted, the presidency seems less deserving of a holiday than ever, and certainly no more than the other two branches of government.

So, why isn’t there a national holiday to celebrate the Congress or the judiciary? I’m not saying there should be, just asking why does the executive branch or any president deserve a holiday of their own?

Presidents’ Day has become nothing more than a midwinter break, a three-day weekend for car dealerships, appliance stores, and whoever else has excessive inventory to use patriotism as a marketing device. There is no national reflection on what the presidency means. We don’t pause to venerate good presidents or castigate bad ones.

Why not dump Presidents’ Day in favor of Constitution Day, which now falls on Sept. 17, the day the Constitution was adopted, but isn’t a federal holiday. It could easily be moved to February so as not to clutter September with a national holiday beyond Labor Day.

Constitution Day would remind all citizens and all branches of government that they have an obligation to uphold and defend not the individual who occupies the White House, but the document from which all power derives, a document that has proved stronger and less susceptible to vanity and human frailty.

Better to pay homage to the nation’s guiding principles, to something that holds us all equal in the eye of the law and stops us from falling under the kind of monarchy we broke away from, than whichever wholly-bought political entity manages to spend the most money to secure the most Electoral College votes.

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Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at kevin.cullen@globe.com.

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It’s time to dump Presidents’ Day - The Boston Globe
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