We're in a fight that is determining whether we continue degrading the republic - while pretending it's still a democracy - and slide full-bore into The Daddy State, or figure out a way to reclaim our little experiment in self-government, and get back to an effort at making some nominal progress towards that more perfect union thing we love to talk about while almost totally (and maybe intentionally) misunderstanding.
JD Mortenson, Law Prof, Univ of Mich, in The Atlantic:
Is the president a king? The question may sound absurd, but you’d be surprised: A great many lawyers, politicians, judges, and policy experts think the U.S. Constitution builds from exactly that starting point. Their argument relies on the first sentence of Article II, which gives the president “the executive power.” That phrase, they claim, was originally understood as a generic reference to monarchical authority. This means, they say, that the American president must have been given all the prerogatives of a British king, except where the Constitution specifies otherwise. The foreign-relations scholar Philip Trimble states their conclusion plainly: “Unless the [Article II] Vesting Clause is meaningless, it incorporates the unallocated parts of Royal Prerogative.”
That last bit - about how the Vesting Clause includes Royal Prerogative - is nine kinds of fucked up, and it's the big tell when it comes to figuring out what the Radical Right is up to.
What it says:
The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.
What it means to normal humans (what we were all taught in Junior High School Civics class):
The Legislative Branch (the Article 1 guys; the 1st-among-equals guys) will deliberate about how the country should operate; they'll make laws; and they'll hire a guy to run it for them - an executive guy - a guy who'll hire other guys to make sure the will of the people (as represented in Congress) is being faithfully and fairly applied to the daily goings-on in the United States Of America. And even though POTUS can veto a law, Congress can override that veto if they're working together, and that means the president and congress have to work together too -if they wanna get anything done.
That is the conservative take on things. ie: Checks and Balances - trying to make sure not too much government power is in too few hands, and fostering a workable relationship pointed at keeping everybody accountable.
What it means to the Radical Right: (what they've been pimping at us for 40+ years)
Our guy got "elected", and he can do whatever he thinks is OK and if you want something different - well fuck you, we won, get over it.
That's an extraordinarily liberal interpretation of "Executive Power".
- more from Professor Mortenson's piece -
After years of research into an enormous array of colonial, revolutionary, and founding-era sources, I’m here to tell you that—as a historical matter—this president-as-king claim is utterly and totally wrong. I’ve reviewed more than a thousand publications from the 17th and 18th centuries for each instance of the word root exec-, and have read most of those texts from cover to cover with the topic of presidential power squarely in mind. I’ve read every discussion of executive power and presidential authority that appears in the gigantic compilation of archival materials known as the Documentary History of the Ratification of the United States Constitution. And with the help of a team of research assistants, I’m most of the way through flyspecking the full records of the Continental Congress—including committee reports, floor debates, and delegate correspondence—with the same question in mind.
All this work has left me with both the confidence to share this conclusion and the sense of obligation to do so as bluntly as possible. It’s just not a close call: The historical record categorically refutes the idea that the American revolutionaries gave their new president an unspecified array of royal prerogatives. To the contrary, the presidency that leaps off the pages of the Founders’ debates, diaries, speeches, letters, poems, and essays was an instrument of the law of the land, subject to the law of the land, and both morally and legally obliged to obey the law of the land.
"...the presidency...an instrument of the law of the land, subject to the law of the land, and both morally and legally obliged to obey the law of the land."
- and -
...The constitutional text doesn’t actually authorize the president to do very much. It enumerates the veto, appointments, and pardon powers. It grants the president “the executive power” and the office of commander in chief. It authorizes the president to receive foreign ambassadors, demand reports from his subordinates, and deliver a State of the Union address. But aside from a few miscellaneous process authorities, that’s just about it.
- and -
“The executive power” granted at the American founding was conceptually, legally, and semantically incapable of conveying a reservoir of royal authority. The real meaning of executive power was something almost embarrassingly simple: the power to execute the law. Overwhelming evidence for this point pervades both the Founders’ debates and the legal and political theory on which their discussions drew.
