The Power of the Presidency

Jack Goldsmith's back, with another excellent essay in this month's New Republic. It's a review of John Yoo and Garry Wills' books on the constitutional extents of executive power, and it includes an interesting historical analysis that shows why liberals supported powerful presidencies until Vietnam, while conservatives adopted a mirror path. One excerpt:

A second lesson is that the text and the original understanding of the Constitution often do not yield determinate answers concerning the separation of powers. Yoo is right to emphasize that the Framers--burned by their experience with the feckless executive power that the Articles of Confederation had lodged in Congress--created a strong and independent presidency that could enforce the law, and help maintain the national defense, and act swiftly in crisis. This is a point downplayed by Burnham and modern presidential critics, just as Yoo downplays the ways the Constitution sought to place legal checks on the president. The complicated truth is that the Framers had cross-cutting concerns about legislative and executive power and spoke in many voices. They worried about a too-weak Congress and a too-strong Congress and about a too-weak president and a too-strong president. The Constitution’s final allocation of power involved many compromises embodied in sometimes imprecise provisions that meant different things to different people and interacted in unpredictable ways.