The Fantasy of the Unitary Executive

When the Founders sat down in 1789 to prepare a constitution for the new nation they'd just created, they had a number of basic ideas on how its government should function. One of them was that, having just achieved independence from the rule of a powerful king, they wanted a head of government strong enough to provide the requisite leadership, but constrained enough to prevent leadership from becoming tyranny. Their solution was the creation of a three-branch government in which the division of responsibilities and ability of each branch to check the others would provide a system which, while cumbersome, would protect the liberties that could be denied by an all-powerful ruler. The three branches of government described in the Constitution were, of course,

The Executive, responsible for carrying out the laws;

The Legislative, responsible for creating the laws; and,

The Judicial, responsible for interpreting the laws as needed.

The Constitution (Article II, Section 1) states that "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America," but it does not spell out in much detail what that "executive power" means ... and that brings us to the conservative fever dream of the "Unitary Executive."

According to the Unitary Executive theory, the President - as the only national-level officer of government elected by (and thus answerable to) the entire nation - has sole and unquestioned authority over the entire Executive Branch of the government. The idea is that the people elected the President to implement the agenda on which he or she ran, and the President thus needs absolute control over the entire Executive Branch (not to mention a whip hand over Congress) in order to put that agenda into place. 

The Unitary Executive theory meets political reality when presidents want to fire the heads of independent agencies established by Congress they view as insufficiently dedicated to implementing their agendas. Or when a President declares that a particular Cabinet office (for instance, the Department of Education) or independent, Congressionally-established agency (such as the US Agency for International Development) should be eliminated. Or when a President seeks to eliminate opposition to their agenda by directing the Department of Justice to investigate or prosecute their opponents. Can they do that? Many conservative thinkers insist that the President, as a Unitary Executive, can, and the current heavily conservative Supreme Court says "yes," at least in some cases. 

One needs to ask what the difference is between a Unitary Executive and the sort of king we fought the Revolutionary War to shake off. If there's a difference, I don't see it.

I realize that my opinion counts for less than nothing in the age of Der Furor, but if you ask me, the name of this theory is wrong ... it's not a Unitary Executive, but a Urinary Executive - a president who gets to happily pee on the Constitution and on We the People, as Der Furor is doing every day.

Have a good day, and remember that Americans don't believe in kings. Or didn't before now.

More thoughts coming.

Bilbo