Of "executive power"

The United States Constitution, in Article II, Section, 1, states:

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.

Curiously, nowhere in the Constitution is "The executive Power" defined.

Prof. Julian Davis Mortenson took a stab at figuring out what "executive power" actually meant to the generation that wrote the Constitution. His piece begins, somewhat provocatively, "Is the president a king?" Put so baldly the question sounds "absurd", as Mortenson admits, but "[a] great many lawyers, politicians, judges, and policy experts think the U.S. Constitution builds from exactly that starting point". One of those judges is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and one of those lawyers is Attorney General William Barr. In short, imperial-presidency advocates carry a lot of weight in our current government.

As for Mortenson (spoiler alert!):

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.

Not that this should come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the Revolutionary War: Britain's George III is no hero in any American telling of that tale. The astonishing thing, then, is that so many otherwise intelligent people think the Constitution would grant the president such royal power.

(Lest you think this is an anti-Trump hit piece, by the way, Prof. Mortenson notes that both Obama and W also argued for arguably over-broad interpretations of presidential power when it suited them.)

This is an important piece to read if you want to understand what the founding generation actually intended the president to do in our government. It wasn't much, at least at the beginning of the republic.

Prof. Mortenson has a warning for textual originalists, as so many conservatives today are:

You can advocate originalism in constitutional interpretation. You can support the imperial presidency. But you can’t do both at the same time.

However you feel about presidential power, you owe it to yourself to read this relatively short but cogent piece.