The Asymmetric Logic of Presidential Power

• In Event: The Presidency, Democratic Mobilization, and the State

Abstract

Long before Donald Trump indicated his intention to wage war on the “Deep State,” conservatives looked upon the federal bureaucracy with abject contempt. In this chapter, which is part of a larger book project, we document the consequences of such views for presidential power. Conservatives, we show, came to view a more powerful presidency as the solution to a manifestly political problem: namely, how to dismantle an administrative state whose dominant liberal components they steadfastly opposed when neither Congress nor the courts were suited to offer a corrective. We further illustrate how conservative claims about a vastly more powerful presidency, encapsulated most clearly in the Unitary Executive Theory, threaten both the rule of law and democracy itself.

Authors

• William G. Howell, University of Chicago

• Terry M. Moe, Stanford University