The President Can Do Whatever He Wants, Which Is Why He Can’t

Power enables. But in a properly functioning democratic republic, power also constrains.

This was a recurrent theme in the constitutional debates of the founding era and played a particularly prominent role in the design of the executive branch. At the Constitutional Convention, at the state ratifying conventions that followed, and in the country’s earliest years post-ratification, individual Founders took turns advocating for concentrating executive authority in a single man. They did so even though, as recent subjects of the British crown, they were well aware of the risks of this model. Why? Because they believed it would ensure, rather than diminish, the citizenry’s ability to hold the executive branch to account. They explicitly reasoned that if sufficient authority was vested in the president, he could not hide behind advisers or subordinates, or a complicated executive-governance apparatus, to evade responsibility for his wrongful conduct or poor decision making.

This is the too-often forgotten half of the constitutional blueprint for presidential authority. In the Founders’ original design, accountability was supposed to serve as the wiring that runs inside the walls and under the floors of executive power.

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