American History Hit - How Much Power Does the President Have?

Episode Date: December 29, 2025

Ever since independence, a question has hovered over the government of the United States. How much power should the President have? Not too much, lest they become a monarch. But not too little, they are elected to do a job and that job must be done.In this episode of American History Hit, Don is joined once again by Professor of Political Science, Graham G Dodds. Graham is author of 'The Unitary Presidency' and, together, he and Don discuss the power of the President.Can they commit a crime? How has the unitary executive been used in domestic, and foreign, spaces? And where was this theory born - with the Constitution, Hamilton, Reagan or Bush?Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code AMERICANHISTORY.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. The ship's wooden hull scrapes against the jagged rock. To port, sirens beckon, singing their plaintive invitations to the deep.

To starboard, steep cliffs loom high, shedding boulders that crash into the raging sea. We're in the midst of a tempest. In the chaos, no one can tell quite which way is safe. Below deck, passengers huddle and terror, hearing the timbers split and splinter. On deck, others gazed toward a dark horizon entranced by those ethereal voices. The crew, meanwhile, drenched and weary, cares only for its salvation, for bringing this battered ship home to warmth, to light, to supper. But the wheel stands on the bridge in the captain's hands.

And though there are systems to guide and temper him, in truth, the course we sail is his alone. Good day, it's Don Wildman, and this is a man. American history hit. 247 years ago, in 1777, the Articles of Confederation were approved by the Second Continental Congress of the United States, coming into force in 1781. Very broadly, the Articles of Confederation set severe limitations on the role and effectiveness of the federal government. Consequently, the articles would be replaced, eventually, by the U.S. Constitution. One of those limitations was an intentionally weak chief executive. Any president would serve only a single year term and would in effect answer to Congress. After having undertaken

a drawn out and difficult war to break away from monarchy overseas, the last thing our founders wanted was to reconstitute our own all-powerful leader who could do as they pleased. Well, times have certainly changed. The process of concentrating more and more power in the office of the presidency started with Alexander Hamilton, calling for it in Federalist Paper No. 70, then saw Abraham Lincoln flexing the great muscle of his office during the Civil War, and throughout most presidencies of the 20th century, the power of the office has only increased. In Federalist number 70, Hamilton coined the term unitary executive, distinguishing the presidency as a sole figure, embodying an entire branch of U.S. government, the executive branch, as opposed to the hundreds of members of the legislative

branch and nine judges of the judicial. In the presidency, we have one person, a uniting executive, able to inflict extreme powers at will. While this is completely normal to us today, it was a big departure from the original articles conceived by the founders. As we fast approach a pivotal presidential election, the Unitary Executive Theory is receiving renewed attention as it really deserves. As Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, and many others once cautioned us, what happens with the Unitary Executive will have everything to do with what kind of American society we live in, possibly for centuries to come. Today, we discuss the Unitary Executive Theory with Dr. Graham G. Dodds, Associate Professor of History at Concordia University in Montreal, who joined us but a few

weeks ago for episode 181, Presidential Pardons. Please check it out. Our interview today owes itself to Professor Dodd's 2020 book, The Unitary Presidency. Hello, Graham. Thanks for coming back on the show. Happy to be with you, Don. We ordinarily steer clear of current affairs on this series. We're all about history here, but it's hard to ignore the news these days about this notion,

the unitary executive, very much the theme of the Trump candidacy for the second term. But it's really an idea that predates him, right? Hamilton starts the discussion back in 1788. Yeah, that's right. This unitary executive thing, as such, has been kicking around since the 1980s, but the people who are in favor of it would say that even though the name is only a few decades old, that the idea goes back to the founding, that the founding fathers, the framers, had this in mind when they created the Constitution under which we still live today. And in their telling every single president from Washington onward has, in one way or another, acted in accordance with this theory, the theory of the unitary executive. That's the change that really we'll talk about under the Bush

administration. But the theory of the unitary executive, what exactly is that? What's the theory they're talking about? This is a tough question to answer because there is no one canonical, authoritative version of the theory. There is no sort of articulation of it that everybody would agree with. And it's further complicated because there are lots of other theories that are very closely related to it. So it's a simple question, but it's going to be a long complicated answer. Shall I give it a shot? Sure. At the most basic level, what I understand the unitary executive theory to hold is that whatever actions, whatever powers, whatever executive powers of federal government might have or use, At the end of the day, those powers should be supervised by, managed by, controlled by the chief

executive, the president of the United States. So when you say it that way, it's almost a tautology. All executive powers should be supervised, controlled by the chief executive. How could it be otherwise? But if you think it through, it's rather more complicated and potentially problematic. What this is saying is that the president should essentially have almost total control over everything and everyone in the vast executive branch. This means almost total control over dozens of major governmental institutions and perhaps some four million governmental employees,

if you include the military. So when you say it like that, it makes the president almost sound like an absolute monarch. In fact, it brings to mine that, you know, King Louis 14th of France's claim, you know, I am the state. The state is me. If the president has that much power, what's the point in having other branches or anything? Basically, we're talking about the checks and balances that Americans take such pride in understanding. It's the basics of civics in America, really, one branch checking out the other and balancing the government in that regard. This throws that way out of kilter. I agree. I think this is one of the reasons to be cautious about it, worried about it, to think this through very carefully and to be concerned about how it might be used

going forward. I mean, the U.S. system is one that famously or infamously fractures power that breaks it into lots of pieces and institutions. It makes it very hard to get anything done. And some people say that's a problem. I'm inclined to say, no, that shows the system is working as it was designed. It was designed to be hard to get anything done. It was designed to have these pieces have the means and motive of checking the others to keep that balance. But the Unitarian Executive Theory to my mind does hold out the possibility that one of the pieces, the president, would gain significant power at the expense of the others. All those pieces that we're talking about, you gave a list there, that's the extraordinary thing.

I mean, if you have Congress, you have all kinds of committees and many different people, and that's all happening under an understanding that this is a bunch of people talking about this. This is, we're talking, I mean, it's really extraordinary. You have all those cabinet positions, agriculture, commerce, defense, education, energy, health, human services, homeland security. I mean, it's really an incredibly long list. The philosophy of this idea is that all gets captured in one person, essentially, in terms of the structure of this idea. That's right. That's right. It's the president at the top of this big pyramid of the executive branch, followed by what, the vice president, the cabinet, the various departments and agencies and all these institutions, including the FBI, the attorney general, the military, maybe even the Federal Reserve on some understandings. all this under the direct control of the president who can sort of bark orders. And if his subordinates

don't say, yes, sir, I'll do it by the close of business today. Well, they can be fired at his whim. The key word in this is vesting. It's even called the vesting clause, which is Article 2, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution, vests executive power in the president of the United States. And basically it says president no one else has executive power. This is what those lawyers in the Reagan era were trading on. You saw it in the famous movie that was made about George Bush back then. Dick Cheney grumbling about the unitary executive, that was the first time I haven't heard of that idea. Yeah, it's kind of nice when this abstracted of academic focus becomes a topic of pop culture. It shows that other things that professors like myself talk about aren't altogether distance from reality. But yes, the vesting clause is one of the key things that proponents of this theory.

I should say the proponents of the theory are generally called Unitarians and, you know, members of the main line. Protestantal denomination may dislike that, but we'll use that term advisedly in this context. So, yeah, the theory comports with the desires of the founders, especially Alexander Hamilton, for an energetic executive. And moreover, they say there are three things in the Constitution, in Article 2, the part that describes the president, that support the theory. And chief among those is the vesting clause, as you say, this idea that the Constitution vests the executive power in the president. And there's a debate about what exactly that means. On the one hand, it could be just conferring a title that the person, the guy or someday gal who has executive function shall

be called the president. On another view, it's saying this one individual has all the executive power as if that's a thing it's out there and every last little bit of it will be under the control of this one person. That's one thing that they point to. But they also point to other parts of Article 2, the oath of office in which the president is charged to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. And in Unitarian's construction, this means the president is uniquely responsible to ensure that government proceeds in a way that comports with the Constitution. This is a pretty big task. And usually this is something people don't worry about. I mean, people worry about the oath of office when, well, with Barack Obama, when the Chief Justice

stumbled on it and they seemed they had to redo it again to make sure that it was a legitimate oath, Or people say, well, when Donald Trump directs a mob to attack Congress, this is subverting the Constitution, arguably. But this idea that the president has a unique responsibility to follow the Constitution arguably gives him power. The last thing in Article 3 that Unitarians point to is the take care clause, that the president is instructed to take care that the laws are faithfully implemented. And for some Unitarians, this means that the president is able to interpret laws as he thinks appropriate to ensure that they comport with American governments and constitutionalism. So it gives him a unique power in enforcing and interpreting what Congress has passed legislatively. So based on all those sort of constitutional points, they claim that this supports the view that all executive power should be controlled by the president. And they also would say, aside from the constitutional points, that is a good thing because it helps ensure that there's accountability, that there's political accountability.

If the bureaucracy messes up, who are you going to blame? Well, insofar if the president is in control of it all, you hold the president accountable. So that's surely a good thing, they would say. It gives relevance to law students everywhere. The arguments over one word, the word vesting, is so powerful here. but you really can go pretty deep with it. What I find so exciting about this subject is its historical precedent. You can really trace throughout these 200 plus years the step-by-step process of this through

many different cases, and it sort of ramps up in the 20th century. But it really starts at the very core of the matter. It really starts with Hamilton's argument that he eventually enacts as a power with the whole federalizing of the state debts in shoving the federal government. forward as the power in the United States versus the states. For him, the executive was the sort of symbol of all that, wasn't it? Yeah, I mean, Alexander Hamilton has come to be understood as one of the chief champions of a strong executive, a strong president, a fan of, in his terms, an energetic president or president who would have a lot of power and might even lead. And as you say, at the outset,

the sort of situation under the Articles of Confederation was deemed to be inconvenient, unacceptable and adequate in large part because there was no real executive functions. So when they decided to scrap the articles and moved to a new constitution at the convention in my home city of Philadelphia back in the day, the desire to create executive power and to institutionalize that in a single individual, that was a lot of the driving force behind the Constitution. Yeah. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. There's a couple of cases to talk about Myers versus the United States, an 1876 law about Postmasters General, which was such a big position in those days versus today.

This was eventually President Woodward Wilson removes Myers, a postmaster first class, without seeking the Senate approval. This is a huge deal at the time because he was acting outside of the lines as Congress would have seen it. But it's these kinds of things that start to move this needle. of executive power along the way. Right, that's right. Chief among the ways in which this abstract theory has a sort of real everyday controversy

is in the president's desire to control and fire people subordinate to him within the executive branch. So that's where a lot of these sort of court cases and specific controversies come from. And the one you pointed to, yeah, the Supreme Court decided in this case of Myers versus United States way back and almost a century ago that they should up, hold the president's exclusive power to remove executive branch officials. So that makes it seem like, aha, the Supreme Court has endorsed something like what the Unitarians are claiming the president should be able to do, control people who are subordinates. But it goes from there. It's a little

bit more complicated, right? Just a decade later in the case of Humphrey's executor versus United States, the court says that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was wrong to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission, who was essentially a holdover from the previous regime. Now, we think, gee, if the president comes in, he should be able to get rid of people that the other team had in place, but maybe not. So, you know, the court has a series of cases that one could use to support one side or the other about this. And I should say that the court, to my mind, has not ever clearly ruled on the appropriateness of the unitary executive theory per se. But rather, there are a lot of cases that have sort of touched at the edges of it, and therefore cases that one side or the other

could use to support its view about whether the theory is accurate or not or desirable or not. Yeah. As you bring up, the idea of the theory is something that really becomes not institutionalized, but certainly formalized under the Bush administration, especially by Cheney. So what is it that makes this theory different than all the normal constitutional arguments that were made in the courts? I mean, there are a million different theories of presidential power, but I think it can be useful, and I alluded to this at the outset, to sort of distinguish the Unitary Executive Theory from other theories that are similar to it, yet distinct from it, and should not be conflated with it. And to my mind, there are at least a few of these that we might sort of try to get clear on. For example, there is what people call the imperial presidency. This is a popular theory articulated by the historian Arthur Schlesinger in the 1970s. to describe what he perceived to be the excesses of the office with Johnson and Vietnam and Nixon and Watergate saying that the presidency has just gone off the rails, that we've got a president who is imperial, who's essentially an autocrats, and this is no good, this has to stop. There are certain affinities with that point of view and at least the Interior Executive Theory as portrayed by its critics.

So there's that. Another theory to throwing the mix is that of the administrative presidency. This was articulated by the public policy scholar Richard Nathan, also in the 1970s to describe the efforts of the Nixon administration, which found that it was going to have a hard time getting what it wanted legislatively through Congress. So perhaps it could try instead to get what it wanted administratively through the bureaucracy, i.e. by controlling the bureaucracy, or at least the people at the upper echelons of it, who would be political loyalists appointed by Nixon to ensure that his will trickled down to the lower bureaucrats. And then, thirdly, to my mind, another sort of closely aligned theory is that of the unilateral

presidency, which is something I've also written about. This is the idea that presidential power can be significant in terms of things the president can do unilaterally by himself, herself, without having to go through Congress. These include, for example, the use of executive orders, proclamations, president, memoranda, devices via which the president can sit down, pull out a pen, a piece of paper, and make binding policy, law-like policy, unilaterally without having to go through Congress. And again, these things are in a way related to the Unitary Executive Theory, but I think they are distinct from it, and we should try to keep them separate as much as possible.

But again, the Unitary Executive Theory just says all executive functions should be controlled uniquely by this one individual, completely by this one individual. Well, it's no part shared or reserved. The president gets all the executive power. So when Nixon says so famously in that Frost interview, if the president does it, it's not illegal. This is what he's referring to, right? Yeah, in part, I'm not sure he quite thought about it in those terms, but for people who adhere to this theory, they might say, you know, he's right. And that was shocking at the time. This is something that obviously has come up in more recent months with former president Donald Trump.

but the idea that the president should exert some control over the adjudication of law in terms of the attorney general, the FBI, et cetera, various inquiries, legal inquiries, special counsel studies about whether the president should be impeached or did something naughty. And Donald Trump's telling, he felt he should be able to fire special counsel Robert Mueller, who was investigating possible presidential wrongdoing. He did not push that issue in the way that Nixon did, but it's the same sort of idea that, look, these guys work for me. If I don't want them investigating me, I say, stop it. Don't investigate me, investigate these other guys, and do it right now pronto. For some fans of the literary executive theory, that's entirely appropriate.

What was Cheney's part in this? Why was he such a forward-thinking person in this regard for those who believe in this theory? Yeah, Cheney had worked in federal politics for a long time before becoming George W. Bush's vice president, of course, and he was an official, especially under Gerald Ford, and he had this sense, based on his experience in the Ford administration, that in the aftermath of Watergate, in his telling, Congress had pulled back too much power. Congress had sought to rein in the imperial president, and in Cheney's view, had gone too far, such that ever since then, he felt the presidency should be reinvigorated. And when he became VP under George W. Bush, he saw the opportunity to do this.

And one of the main ways of doing this was by embracing the Unitary Executive Theory that had been sort of concocted or labeled as such promoted under Ronald Reagan. So, yes, Bush is sort of the second coming of the Unitary Executive Theory from its early days under the Reagan administration. He really embraces it. He uses it. He refers to it explicitly quite often in his presidential signing statements. But he also doesn't just revive it. He rather pushes it in a new direction. Whereas previously the Unitary Executive Theory before Bush had been about domestic politics and control of the bureaucracy as it related to domestic issues, Bush arguably uses the unitary executive theory to justify many of the things, many of the extraordinary things he wanted to do in the course of the war on terror.

So for Bush, it moves from domestic to foreign. And part of that is in Bush's articulation of this, the president allegedly has a certain sort of inherent power to defend the nation to do what must be done to ensure that there's not another 9-11 and that the bad guys are brought to justice. Right. And we saw how that played out, which is very illustrative of the dangers involved in this. You know, wherever your position is on that administration and that war, the unitary executive had everything to do with the choices that were made. and inflicted upon the enemy in this case, which is really interesting and important to consider. There are so many opponents to this whole idea. Where do they find their grounding? Because the more we're talking, it sounds like, boy, it's baked into the Constitution.

There are a lot of ways in which one might object to this. I think that one way is to say, look, this thing did not come out of nowhere. This theory was not uncovered. It wasn't discovered in the course of some disinterested academic research. This wasn't a case of a scholar digging through a musty old archive and finding Alexander Hamilton's secret notes in which he says, this is what I mean, this is what I want. No, this was purposefully concocted by conservative lawyers under the Reagan administration initially to help a radically conservative president move the country in a radically conservative direction to put to bed the legacy of the New Deal and empower him to make a sharp right turn. Now, that doesn't mean the theory is wrong or necessarily biased, but I think it just makes sense to be aware of the circumstances in which this thing was first articulated and promoted. So that's sort of one point of criticism.

A second point is that, look, it's just one theory out of many, right? I mean, it can sound persuasive, but there are a million out there. I mean, law journals and political science journals are chocka block with different understandings of presidential power. There are various other ways in which people could, I think, argue against it. For example, as you said at the outset, most folks who study American political history would say that over the years, the decades, the generations, the centuries, presidential power has grown. It has grown in absolute and relative terms. The presidency has grown in large part at the expense of Congress, such that today the president is a much bigger, powerful figure than what the founding fathers envisioned. And here, yet we have the Unitarian saying, oh, and he should be even stronger still. I think a lot of folks who care about the balance of power, the imbalance of power, are worried that the last thing we need is an even stronger president.

I could go on and on. There are various ways one could argue against this. I think at some point in an American's lifetime, you realize that this country is an oil tanker that takes forever to turn left or right. In some ways, it's meant to be. That's the idea of this country. country, that there are so many checks and balances built in that it's really hard to make one administration have such an impact that it actually steers one way or the other. That's what's at stake these days because the problems have grown to such a point that many people believe that the executive branch is the only way to alter the situation, to fix problems as they're perceived.

And that's what's at stake today. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Again, the system is designed to make it hard to get things done. And in that sense, it works quite well. some might say, well, gee, that's a dumb way to design a system, but that's a separate debate, right? We've got the system. It's supposed to be hard to get things done. And boy, it is hard to get things done. Just ask Joe Biden or any other president. And this is a thing. Almost every president, especially in recent memory, has said it's hard to do things.

Even though they are perhaps the most powerful person on the planet, generally speaking, the president can't just snap his fingers and make things happen. Generally, you have to go through Congress or even if it's administrative law. They're hurdles. It takes time. It's hard. So inevitably, presidents are sympathetic to theories to justifications that say they should be able to do this, that, and the other thing. And they are inclined to seize on any kind of principle rationale to justify doing what they would want to do. Was Reagan able to make those changes as a result of unitary executive theory? To my mind, Reagan got done much of what he got done through more traditional needs. means through legislation. He was able to get all sorts of things through Congress, even with

Democratic control for a while. So I don't know if I would say the Unitary Executive played a huge role in him doing many of the things that he did. But in subsequent presidents, it has become, I think, more and more important. I mean, put it this way, it's the kind of thing that people who study the presidency are now talking about, whereas decades ago, I think very few were attuned to this. I'll be back with more American history after this short. break. So the unitary executive theory, Graham, is really about the strength of the executive, the president, versus the other branches of government. This has always been a discussion since

the beginning back in the founders. It's in the Constitution. The president is vested with the powers right there in Article 2 and told by the founders that the office is responsible for so much. And there's a long list that we went down as to what is vested in this single position as opposed to those in Congress and the judicial branch. It's a fascinating illustration of how confusing the United Constitution can be sometimes based on one word, vesting. It's an incredible thing. But the unitary executive theory has become a much more present topic based on what's happening today. And we're really talking about this because of what we're hearing in the news in the context of the presidential election. Project 2025 is very much a headline news. And we're in the summer when we're

talking about this right now, it's only going to get bigger. What's going on in the current affairs in this country that's going to alter the situation with the theory of the unitary executive? Well, I think as you're alluding to, Don, the biggest thing, of course, is the November election. Not every president since this thing was coined has explicitly said that they like it. The biggest sort of fans of it have been conservative Republicans, Reagan, George W. Bush, Donald Trump, But even the Democratic presidents in that era have also in some way or another acted in accordance with it. But Donald Trump is an interesting character in this regard. Look, I mean, in terms of the specific issues where the unitary executive theory comes up,

it comes up in disputes about the president's power to influence or remove people within the executive branch to fire them, to issue signing statements that indicate his views about constitutionality or his attitude towards the implementation and enforcement of laws, his ability and influence or even control regulatory activity, agency rulemaking, administrative law. So lots of presidents have the theory come up in those contexts. But to my mind, with Trump, it's a different thing altogether. I mean, it's, I think, not going to strike many people as controversial that this view of extreme individual executive control kind of fits with Donald Trump's personality. Can we say that he has a healthy ego? You know, as he said at the Republican convention, I alone can fix this.

It's all about me, me, me, me. Well, you know, it's maybe a caricature of the theory, but that's not too far from what the unitary executive theory wants. We saw, you know, the president likes to fire people. I just go back to The Apprentice. And he, in his first term, complained that he was unable to have as much control over things within the executive branch as he would want. And he was speaking chiefly about his first attorney general,

Jess Sessions and the FBI and saying, I can't call off this investigation. I would like to. I should be able to. but I can't, woe was me. So one can be assured that if there is another Trump presidency, this stuff will come back. And look, he and his fans have had four years now to plan for what would be done in a second term. And I think chief among the potential actions, and you alluded to this, is what in his first term, he called Schedule F,

which was this idea that you pass an executive order to remove thousands of government employees from the protections of the Trump. traditional civil service, and you make them in a new class that can be fired by the president at will. And, you know, Trump put this in at the last minute. It was challenged in court and Biden reversed it. But if Trump comes back, he will try this again. And, you know, it is in keeping with the unitary executive that the president should be able to snap his fingers and have his subordinates act quickly in accordance with his wishes. But for others, it's deeply troubling. It sort of politicizes a huge chunk of the federal bureaucracy that should perhaps not be politicized, that these are regular government public servants who are there to adjudicate things in an unbiased fashion and have a certain expertise. And maybe it's not right that the most powerful person on the planet can tell them what to do.

Yeah, it's very much the line in the sand that everyone's worried about. You get too close to it, you cross it, and you're into the land of monarchy and autocracy. Project 2025, which is created by the Heritage Foundation, is central to this whole situation. It's basically a blueprint for the greatest unitary executive practice that's in the history of the land. Is that fair to say? Yeah, I think so. We will see what comes of it if Trump is reelected, but I would think that he would definitely try to implement much of what is in there. Again, you can find this online.

It's not a secret. This isn't a conspiracy. It's quite out in the open saying, given the chance, this is what we want to do. And here it is. So it's something that I suppose voters should look at and be aware of when they decide who the support come November. But yeah, the right has very much embraced the idea of the Unitary Executive. Again, it was born under Reagan. It was promoted under George W. Bush. Many things in Donald Trump's first term speak to it. But to my mind, there is nothing about it that necessarily should be embraced only by people on the political right. I mean, think of it this way.

someday, perhaps not in the near future, we could have a radically leftist center president. I don't know if Bernie Sanders will still be running, but maybe a representative AOC could be president. And what if she were to say, I love the unitary executive? I'm going to use it to nationalize industry and to tax the heck out of millionaires. And what then? I mean, would the people who have supported, created, and promoted this theory say, fine and good, I'd rather you not, but that is your rights? Or would they say, yeah, it turns out we don't like this thing after. all. And I think Barack Obama is an interesting character in this regard. I mean, he was a constitutional

law professor well before he became president. And he had a sort of, I think, reserve about his politics in general. I think that carried over to a disinclination to kind of push the envelope when it came to matters of constitutional theory. So I can see with him a sort of principal diversion to this kind of thing. But then you get a president like Donald Trump, who I will say that in his first term, he did not invoke it quite as often or as thoroughly as his unitarian predecessors, especially George W. Bush and his presidential signing statements, used this thing an awful lot. And again, Dick Cheney had a certain principal view about presidential power, whether or not one agrees with it. But I think for Trump, it was often essentially just a

convenient cloak to mask what would otherwise be the sort of actions of an extreme egoist. And it was good in that regard. I mean, the story is that the way Trump persuaded Bill Barr, his second attorney general, to come out of retirement, was by saying, well, gee, if you come out of retirement and the Attorney General, here is a chance for you to entrench and advance your cherished theory, the Unitary Executive. And Bill Barr was a huge fan of the Unitary Executive. He since criticized Trump for a variety of reasons, and I don't know if he regrets some of the things he did in the administration. But this was a major way in which Trump was inclined to do things that fit with the theory. And given the chance, I have no doubt he will do so again. Yeah, I'm squirming in

my chair, because it's so exciting to me to use history in this. fashion to understand the present day so clearly. You see this thing going on for really centuries, but certainly through the decades of my adulthood anyway, and many listeners, that has been developing ever since. And so you can really find relevance, you know, in this history as to how to make decisions in the present day based on this. However you feel, I mean, you can really feel one way or the other, as you say, but it's really, really important and very clear that the choices we make based on this idea of the theory of unitary executive will determine your political choices, certainly in the upcoming presidential election. Yeah, again, this is not sort of an abstract

theory that academics just fight over in law journals or whatnot. This has some real-world influence, and especially, look, let's not put two to find a point on it here, but we're at a time where people are worried about the future of American democracy. So insofar as people are attuned to these debates about the future well-being of American democracy, yeah, I would suggest that the unitary executive theory is a big piece of that. And to show empathy for both sides of the story here, the problems that this country faces and the world faces, frankly, are really, really formidable. And in many people's eyes, very different extremes than ever before. And so they are thinking of vesting that power in the executive to address these issues.

You know, only the president has that capacity given the constitution to take action as they see fit. So I do understand some people's idea of this. I don't know that they're thinking through to a constitutional context for this, but it makes sense, you know, but then you're into the Mussolini world, you know, get these trains running on time kind of idea of what autocracy has always appealed to people for. I agree with you, Don. I mean, the unitary executive theory, at least as promoted by Trump is of a peace with Israeli against the deep state, that it's not enough that, you know, Congress and the Democrats won't let him do what he wants and that courts sometimes stood up to him, but that there's this deep state to this. group of entrenched bureaucrats who are removed from democratic accountability, who are thwarting his will and limiting his success. And well, gee, if he could just fire those people or otherwise control them by a military executive, well, problem solved. So yeah, and again,

every president wants more power. Every president is inclined to latch on to a principled account that would justify doing what he would like to be able to do. So you can understand the sympathies for it, but it is worrisome from the standpoint of democracy. This thing would, I think, further aggravate the imbalance among the three branches. It would make the president even more powerful. It goes against the ideas of administrative neutrality and expertise. And, you know, it doesn't go too far from saying the president has all the executive power to the president saying, I can do whatever I want. That's not a big jump. And that's a real danger. Graham Dodds is an American living in Canada teaching at Concordia University in Montreal.

His personal role, as I stated on our previous episode with you, Graham, is to teach Canadians about the mysteries of American politics. They must just look at you with furrow brow sometimes, I imagine. His book on this subject is entitled The Unitary Presidency and goes into detail about all of what we've discussed today. Don't forget, you can go back to our episode on presidential pardons to hear more from Graham Dodds. Graham, thank you so much for taking time out of your summer. Really appreciate it. It's been a pleasure.

Thank you.