Cass R. Sunstein, This Theory Is Behind Trump’s Power Grab
Professor Sunstein, a distinguished public intellectual, teaches law at Harvard. As I often remark: you can always tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much.
In this guest essay in the New York Times, Sunstein brilliantly covers a whole lot of ground and explains a whole lot of political theory and history, in a way that an ordinary educated person can readily understand.
Bottom line: full presidential control over all aspects of the federal executive is not, contrary to claims of some, mandated by the text of the Constitution or by our history. Such massive control poses many, many dangers.
Professor Sunstein is a polite person, so he did not say, in so many words, that presidential dictatorial powers given to a crazed monomaniac would likely produce disastrous results.
Bad as the unitary executive theory, read broadly, would be, Trump is also pursuing other ideas that are even worse. Sunstein writes,
[C]onsider the claim that the president gets to impound congressionally appropriated funds and choose which ones to spend. That claim would render Congress subordinate to the executive in what might be its most fundamental power: the purse. Impoundment authority, on the part of the president, would go well beyond the idea of a unitary executive. It would be a devastating blow to the separation of powers.
He did not add—but might well have added—that the notion that the president gets to pick and choose which court orders he obeys would likewise end the constitutional republic, and that right soon.
Facing MAGA 