Justice Gorsuch’s Three Important Questions As related in the preceding post, Justice Gorsuch welcomes what he considers a return in Trump v. Slaughter to the traditional constitutional order of governing authority clearly allocated among three separate branches. Yet, he has misgivings of what lies ahead. Confirming the President’s authority to remove agency officials at will as part…

As I suggested at the beginning of this series, I think that Trump v. Slaughter has not received the attention it deserves, because of the furor that resulted from the not unexpected, but societally dangerous, birthright citizenship case, Trump v. Barbara, published by the Supreme Court a day later. The press has not much covered Slaughter, so the public…

The Supreme Court’s reaction against the perceived threat to the Constitution posed by the New Deal: Humphrey’s Excutor v. United States.             The previous post examined the holding in Myers v. United States, which was a resounding victory for the unitary executive. But the matter was not closed. As already discussed, just nine years after Myers, the Supreme Court in Humphreys…

A generation after Andrew Jackson’s conflict with the Whig Party-controlled Senate over the firing of Secretary Duane, the issue of the President’s power to fire subordinates at will flamed up once more, in a clash between President Andrew Johnson and the post-Civil War Congress. Johnson was vice-president when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. He was a…

Article II is relatively brief, and, as shown, the enumerated powers are often ill-defined. In part, this is due, as Hamilton wrote, to the impossibility of clearly laying out every conceivable exercise of executive power. Flexibility was needed to accommodate varied and unpredictable events, especially because Congress would be a part-time legislature while governing was…

The previous post pointed out that the recent case of Trump v. Slaughter raised fundamental questions about the essence of executive power under the Constitution and the foundation of separation of powers for the structure of constitutional government. The text of the Constitution: Article II and the “Executive Power” (or “Vesting”) Clause To address these questions, one…