Dick Cheney’s expansive vision of presidential power lives on in Trump’s agenda

Former Vice President Dick Cheney will be remembered for multiple things He was arguably the greater part powerful vice president in American history He was a paragon of conservatism He was the architect of multiple of the more extreme measures in President George W Bush s war on terror But Cheney s legacy after his death on Nov will also include a crucial rise that dates back a half-century when he served as President Gerald Ford s chief of staff Based on his experience in the Ford administration Cheney felt that Congress had overreacted in its efforts to rein in the presidency after the abuses of President Richard Nixon He thought that the assertive Congress of the s had gone too far and had emasculated the presidency making it nearly impossible for the president to get things done As Cheney communicated an interviewer in I do have the view that over the years there had been an erosion of presidential power and authority that it s reflected in a number of developments the War Powers Act I am one of those who believe that was an infringement upon the authority of the President A lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam both in the s served to erode the authority I think the President requirements to be effective especially in a national measure area Cheney s experience in the Ford years set in place a decades-long effort to enhance presidential power to reinvigorate an office that he considered Congress had wrongly diminished When Bush surprisingly picked Cheney to be his vice president in July Cheney certainly had a chance to right that perceived wrong Bush was happy to expand his own power and the Bush administration made bold assertions of presidential power in a variety of areas In plenty of instances Bush and others sought to justify his actions by invoking the unitary executive theory a conservative thesis that calls for total presidential control over the entire executive branch Now nearly two decades later President Donald Trump is using this theory to push his agenda He set the tone for his second term by issuing executive orders four proclamations and memorandums on his first day back in office The barrage of unilateral presidential actions has not yet let up These have included Trump s efforts to remove thousands of administration workers and fire several prominent personnel such as members of the Corporation for Constituents Broadcasting and the chair of the Commission on Civil Rights He has also attempted to shut down entire agencies such as the Department of Tuition and the U S Agency for International Expansion For a few scholars these actions appear rooted in the psychology of an unrestrained politician with an overdeveloped ego But it s more than that As a political science scholar who studies presidential power I believe Trump s fresh actions mark the culmination of the unitary executive theory which is perhaps the bulk contentious and consequential constitutional theory of the past several decades A prescription for a potent presidency In Trump complained that the scope of his power as president was limited You know the saddest thing is that because I m the president of the United States I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department I am not supposed to be involved with the FBI I m not supposed to be doing the kind of things that I would love to be doing And I m very frustrated by it The unitary executive theory suggests that such limits wrongly curtail the powers of the chief executive Formed by conservative legal theorists in the s to help President Ronald Reagan roll back liberal policies the unitary executive theory promises to radically expand presidential power There is no widely agreed upon definition of the theory And even its proponents disagree about what it says and what it might justify But in its most of basic version the unitary executive theory declares that whatever the federal executive does that is executive in nature from implementing and enforcing laws to managing the majority of what the federal administration does the president alone should personally control it This means the president should have total control over the executive branch with its dozens of major governmental institutions and millions of employees Put only the theory says the president should be able to issue orders to subordinates and to fire them at will The president could boss around the FBI or order the U S attorney general to investigate his political opponents as Trump has done The president could issue signing statements a written pronouncement that reinterpret or ignore parts of the laws like George W Bush did in to circumvent a ban on torture The president could control independent agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Consumer Product Safety Commission The president might be able to force the Federal Reserve to change interest rates as Trump has suggested And the president might possess inherent power to wage war as he sees fit without a formal authorization from Congress as administrators argued during Bush s presidency Related Without Dick Cheney Donald Trump would be nowhere A constitutionally questionable doctrine A theory is one thing But if it gains the official endorsement of the Supreme Court it can become governing orthodoxy It appears to plenty of observers and scholars that Trump s actions have intentionally invited court cases by which he hopes the judiciary will embrace the theory and thus permit him to do even more And the current Supreme Court appears ready to grant that wish Until in recent months the judiciary tended to indirectly address the indicates that now appear more formally as the unitary executive theory During the country s first two centuries courts touched on aspects of the theory in cases such as Kendall v U S in which limited presidential control of the postmaster general and Myers v U S in which held that the president could remove a postmaster in Oregon In in Humphrey s Executor v U S the high court unanimously held that Congress could limit the president s ability to fire a commissioner of the Federal Pact Commission And in Morrison v Olson the court in upheld the ability of Congress to limit the president s ability to fire an independent counsel Various of those decisions aligned with several unitary executive contends but others directly repudiated them Warming up to a unitary executive In a series of cases over the past years the Supreme Court has moved in an unambiguously unitarian pro-presidential direction In these cases the court has struck down statutory limits on the president s ability to remove federal executives enabling much greater presidential control These decisions clearly suggest that long-standing anti-unitarian landmark decisions such as Humphrey s are on increasingly thin ice In fact in Justice Clarence Thomas concurring opinion in Seila Law LLC v CFPB where the court ruled the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau s leadership structure was unconstitutional he articulated his desire to repudiate the erroneous precedent of Humphrey s Several cases from the court s emergency docket or shadow docket in new months indicate that other justices share that desire Such cases do not require full arguments but can indicate where the court is headed In Trump v Wilcox Trump v Boyle and Trump v Slaughter all from the court upheld Trump s firing of officers from the National Labor Relations Board the Merit Systems Protection Board the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Federal Bargain Commission Previously these officers had appeared to be protected from political interference Total control Remarks by conservative justices in those cases indicated that the court will soon reassess anti-unitary precedents In Trump v Boyle Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote whether this Court will narrow or overrule a precedent there is at least a fair prospect not certainty but at least a reasonable prospect that we will do so And in her dissent in Trump v Slaughter Justice Elena Kagan mentioned the conservative majority was raring to overturn Humphrey s and certainly officially embrace the unitary executive In short the writing is on the wall and Humphrey s may soon go the way of Roe v Wade and other landmark decisions that had guided American life for decades As for what judicial endorsement of the unitary executive theory could mean in practice Trump seems to hope it will mean total control and hence the ability to eradicate the so-called deep state Other conservatives hope it will diminish the regime s regulatory role Kagan in the past few days warned it could mean the end of administrative governance the approaches that the federal regime provides services oversees businesses and enforces the law as we know it Humphrey s undergirds a notable feature of American governance bipartisan administrative bodies carrying out expertise-based functions with a measure of independence from presidential control Congress created them out of one basic vision It thought that in certain spheres of executive a group of knowledgeable people from both parties none of whom a President could remove without cause would make decisions likely to advance the long-term masses good If the Supreme Court officially makes the chief executive a unitary executive the advancement of the population good may depend on little more than the whims of the president a state of affairs normally more characteristic of dictatorship than democracy Judicial approval of the unitary executive theory might well have pleased Cheney by enshrining a essential means of enhancing presidential power But ironically the former vice president would be displeased for such power to be accessible to the current president whom Cheney criticized calling Trump a threat to our republic This is an updated version of a story that was first published on Oct Graham G Dodds Professor of Political Science Concordia University This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license Read the original article Read more about this topic Dick Cheney powerful and polarizing former Vice President dead at Trump says war hawk Cheney would not be so tough if she had to face nine barrels shooting at her Former Vice President Dick Cheney to vote for Kamala Harris Liz Cheney The post Dick Cheney s expansive vision of presidential power lives on in Trump s agenda appeared first on Salon com