What are executive orders, and how has the Biden administration used them thus far? Presidential power experts Cristina Rodriguez, professor at Yale Law School and author of The President and Immigration Law, and Michael McConnell, professor at Stanford Law School and author of The President Who Would Not Be King, join host Jeffrey Rosen to answer those questions and more. They recap what they think are the most notable executive actions President Biden has taken in his first weeks in office, what their implications might be, and how they are being challenged, before reflecting on presidential power more broadly.
To see the full list of executive actions discussed in this episode, visit the National Archives Federal Register page “2021 Joe Biden Executive Orders.”
FULL PODCAST
PARTICIPANTS
Michael W. McConnell is the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor and director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His new book is The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution.
Cristina Rodríguez is the Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She is the author of The President and Immigration Law (co-authored with Adam Cox). Rodríguez previously served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice. She is a non-resident fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., a member of the American Law Institute, and a past member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
This episode was produced by Jackie McDermott and engineered by Greg Scheckler with help from Jackie McDermott. Research was provided by Lana Ulrich, Jackie McDermott, and Alexandra "Mac" Taylor.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
- Michael McConnell, The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution
- Cristina Rodriguez and Adam Cox, The President and Immigration Law
- National Archives Federal Register, “2021 Joe Biden Executive Orders”
- Cristina Rodriguez and Michael McConnell, We the People podcast episode, "The Second Impeachment of President Trump”
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TRANSCRIPT
This transcript may not be in its final form, accuracy may vary, and it may be updated or revised in the future.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:00:00] I'm Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center and welcome to We the People, a weekly show of constitutional debate. The National Constitution Center is a nonpartisan nonprofit chartered by Congress to increase awareness and understanding of the constitution among the American people.
President Biden assigned 28 executive orders in his first two weeks in office, by contrast, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who previously held the record signed 30 in his first month. On today's episode, we will discuss President Biden's executive orders and potential legal challenges to them and then we'll dive into a broader conversation about presidential power with two of America's leading experts on the subject.
Michael McConnell is the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor and director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He previously served as a judge on the US court of appeals for the 10th circuit and he's the author of the new book, The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution. Michael, thank you so much for joining.
Michael McConnell: [00:01:08] Thank you, Jeff.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:01:09] And Christina Rodriguez is the Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of law at Yale Law School. She is co author with Adam Cox of The President and Immigration Law. She previously served as deputy assistant attorney general in the office of legal counsel at the US Department of Justice during the Obama administration. Christina, it is wonderful to have you back on the show.
Christina Rodriguez: [00:01:28] Thanks for having me, Jeff.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:01:30] Michael, remind us what an executive order is, where a president's power to issue it comes from and then talk about the kind of substantive orders that President Biden is issuing many of them reverse orders by President Trump. They relate to the census, to immigration, to ethics, to regulation and many other topics. How much will these orders actually achieve?
Michael McConnell: [00:01:56] You have to look at them one at a time. Some of them are exercising direct power that the president himself has either under the constitution or more frequently under a statute. And in that case the executive order actually does have immediate consequence. So for example President Biden has put the United States back into the World Health Organization. That is his authority to do as under the foreign affairs powers of the, of the United States.
And, and in some cases he's not doing some things. So he one of my favorite, my personal one that I most appreciate, and I'm not being ironic is his his reversal of President Trump's emergency order having to do with the border under which President Trump declared an emergency so that he could spend funds that were not appropriated for the purposes of the wall on the wall what I would consider to be a real end run around the appropriations, pol you know, appropriations power of Congress.
Well, Biden reversed that and, and that has actually, that has immediate legal effect. Other things that that he does really have no legal effect of, for example, putting us back into the Paris accord gets lots of applause in some quarters, but it doesn't actually do anything. Around the world, the Paris accord is considered to be a treaty and but in the, in the United States, the president can't enter a treaty.
It has to be ratified by the Senate and that's by a two thirds vote and that's not going to happen. And so just to put his signature on the Paris accords essentially does nothing in terms of American policy. It's a feel good statement of of, you know, Biden telling us as hard as with the climate movement, it doesn't actually accomplish a thing.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:03:51] Christina, Michael reminds us that different executive orders have different legal effect depending on the authority under which they're issued and the degree to which they're supported by a congressional statute or other authorities. CNN's list of the executive order include, executive orders includes the following topics, immigration, healthcare, the environment, equity, Coronavirus, and regulation. Those are the big ones. Perhaps you could highlight some of the most significant of these orders. And I, I guess I'll ask you about immigration, which is a field that you've written about and are a, a leading expert.
Christina Rodriguez: [00:04:23] Sure. Those orders run the gamut from things that have immediate consequences to those that are going to require a longterm work by the agencies that he's directing. So in addition to the, the border wall that the underlying emergency for which has now been declared not an emergency, the, the president can rescind the so-called 212[f] orders.
Those are the orders that excluded citizens or nationals from majority Muslim countries, this so-called travel ban or Muslim ban and a series of orders using the same power restricting legal immigration because of COVID. That has immediate consequence. There are now people who are in line who might be able to come in and it also erases a stain from the, from American immigration policy.
There are others also that have immediate consequence including the decision to declare support for DACA and to fortify DACA. The consequence is that that will then lead the administration not only to continue DACA as was required under the most recent court order, but to actually argue for it in court. So its legal strategy is changing and is required to change. And there are a lot of orders that, that require the Department of Justice to shift course and make different arguments in court.
What happens to DACA in the end is going to depend somewhat on the courts, but now you have the uprise of the United States defending it. And then there are you know a range of immigration orders that direct the secretary of Homeland Security or the attorney general or HHS to take action to remedy things that went wrong during the Trump administration, for example, the creation of the task force to reunite children who remained separated from their families because of the zero tolerance policy.
That by itself doesn't accomplish anything, but it puts lots of resources and personnel and will behind this objective and, and tasks, the heads of various agencies to either engage in this work or have people within their agencies to engage in that work. There are other orders that require the initiation of diplomatic interchange with central American countries to deal with the root causes of migration or for the agency officials to reconsider decisions related to asylum and the immigration courts to see if those can be turned around in some way and the law redefined.
And I think because of those directives, those re-considerations will happen. I think you will see change, but the change is going to come from the decisions made by agency officials and not because of the executive order itself. So in that sense it's, it's a prelude to action but it's not purely symbolic by any means. It will, it will lead to policy change, we just have to wait and see what the scope of that will be.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:06:56] Michael, Christina mentioned that some of President Biden's orders, including those involving immigration will be challenged in court. And indeed on January 26th, the federal judge in Texas blocked President Biden's a hundred day deportation pause President Trump celebrated the victory on Twitter and this puts at least a temporary halt to President Biden's order of US immigration and customs enforcements to halt most deportations from the interior of the US for a hundred days. Tell us about that decision of what is the legal basis for it, what supreme court rulings did the judge rely on and what does it say about other challenges to President Biden's executive orders?
Christina Rodriguez: [00:07:36] So this is a remarkably fast response to to the action to have a federal court already issuing a TRO against one of the executive orders is pretty remarkable. The court gave two reasons for holding that the order was likely illegal. One has to do with the obligation of the president to take care of that the laws be faithfully executed. And since the the, the law of the immigration law provides, and I will actually quote it here 'cause it's quite short.
But it says very specifically that when a final order of removal has been issued that the attorney general shall remove that person within a hundred within 90 days. That does not give the president the discretion to decide not to to remove. So that's an interesting issue in itself. But the other side of that, the second reason I think is even more interesting, which is that the court held that the pre, president did not provide adequate reasons for the reversal of policy.
Now, I would have said two years ago the presidents don't have to give reasons that's they're not covered by the administrative procedure act and courts can't second guess presidents' solid reasons or lack of reasons, but the supreme court just recently in an decision that I would have said was really designed simply to slap down a Trump order and did not have what I would have regarded as very solid legal basis to it, held that when executive orders reverse policy, that they have to, that they have to supply an adequate reason.
So that decision which was celebrated by the anti-Trump forces when it came down is now coming back to bite a a Biden order. Just going to show that you know, one of the key principles of law in this country is what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:09:40] Christina, what do you make of Michael's analysis of this Texas case issued by Judge Tipton and his suggestion that progressive's may come to rue the supreme court victories they want against President Trump's executive orders because they're now coming back to restrain President Biden?
Christina Rodriguez: [00:09:59] I have one worry and one puzzle about that decision. So the worry is that what we will see is the mirror image of what happened during the Trump years, which is that the administrative procedure act and arbitrary and capricious review which is designed to ensure that agencies ground their decisions in reasoned judgment and, and respond to the evidence in the record, and in some way will now be used to slow down the process of administrative change.
And that, that when we look back on this era, we will see the, the Trump years and the courts slowing their efforts to change the regulatory landscape down as the beginning of, in a sense, the weaponization bi-partisan courts of arbitrary capricious review. And I don't think that ultimately will be good for executive governance because it effectively wastes a lot of time by requiring agencies to go back and give reasons that satisfy the court.
Some form of rationality review is certainly appropriate and required, but, but it, there is a risk that we will get out of control. And again, what was used as a way of stopping Trump in its tracks is now I think going to be used, using different district courts, different appellate judges to stop a lot of the Biden orders and efforts by agencies beneath them in their, in their talks.
The puzzle I have about the particular deportation order is that while it, it may be correct to say that the memo was not reasoned or that the statute doesn't allow the delay in the removal of people, if they're supposed to be removed within 180 days after a final order of removal, it's not clear what follows from that because the court cannot order a particular deportation. The court just said, you can't pause deportations.
But if the administration chose not to deport people because there's a specific deportation ordered, I'm not sure that would be in violation of the order. The problem of course, is it's one thing for the secretary to say, no more removals and a whole other thing to stop the whole machinery that's, that's going. And I think the, the significance of the memo that came out from the secretary was to try to give guidance and directive to that machinery.
And, and without that memo, if that's considered to be unlawful, then just the ordinary operations of the system will continue. And so that will thwart the deportation pause, but not because the court's ordering the deportations happen or that specific deportations must happen. And so as it's possible there's another way to try to, to have the pause that was envisioned.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:12:38] I began by noting that President Biden has signed nearly as many executive orders in his first two weeks in office, then FDR signed in his first month and Franklin Roosevelt previously held the record. Newsweek has a different comparison, noting that Biden has signed more executive orders in the first 12 days of his presidency than the combined number issued by his predecessors, Donald Trump and Barack Obama, for the same point in their tenures. Help us put these numbers in historical context. Is it unusual that Biden is signing so many orders and why is he doing it?
Michael McConnell: [00:13:12] Yes. And just pointing out that when Trump and Obama both issued those w, w many people thought those were very large numbers. And so for Biden to double them is really somewhat remarkable. I don't personally think the number matters as much as the substance of them. And, and some of Biden's orders I think are quite consequential, others, and this is not just Biden, this is typical of modern presidents, that some are, you know, purely symbolic and do essentially nothing at all other than, you know, go create a headline in which it creates the impression that he's doing something about a problem even though he's not doing anything really.
But I think the, the numbers may be a symptom of the long-term shift that we've been seeing to a, the presidency as being essentially only really operating governing part of our democracy, that people just don't expect Congress to do anything anymore and it pretty much doesn't do much of anything anymore. I don't think we should be happy that we're seeing government by executive order.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:14:25] Christina, I was struck to read the FDR comparison 'cause he issued so many more executive orders than any other president. Just very broadly, it was, you know, less than 10 in the first years of the republic, it spiked to about 50 under Lincoln then went back down then up to about a thousand or so under Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson and then it goes down again and then Franklin Roosevelt issues 3,721, higher than any other president.
And then it settled into the kind of 300 range for Clinton, Bush, and Obama, and then President Trump in just one term issued 220 nearly as many as his predecessors had in two. And now we have Joe Biden beating FDRs record in his, in his first couple of weeks. So what should we make of that and why is Biden issuing all these executive orders?
Christina Rodriguez: [00:15:11] So I think that the executive order is in some sense, just a form and what matters as Michael said is what's in the executive orders. I think the reason that the Biden administration has issued so many is because across the key policy priorities that he articulated during the campaign his, his predecessor was so diametrically opposed.
And there is a lot that this administration needs to undo at the executive level leaving aside his legislative agenda. In some sense, and this goes to whether there's been a, an increase in executive power more generally, the executive orders seemed to increasingly be vehicles for the articulation of policy priorities. Many of them don't accomplish anything by themselves.
Some of them do if they are exercising express presidential authority, but most of them are directives to agencies to review policies and precedents, or to consider how to achieve a policy objective and issue a report to some official within the White House outlining how that will be done. And so it's the administration announcing what it would ideally like to do, and then tasking the people who have the actual legal authorities to figure out how to do it. And so a lot remains to be seen about whether anything will come of the orders.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:16:27] Michael, let's now turn, scroll on your book. It has garnered high praise from scholars including Cass Sunstein who calls it the very best account of the founders' understanding of the presidency, to Steve Calabresi who says that all future scholarship on the meaning of article tools start with this book.
And one of the most striking things that you say in your introduction is you're trying to offer readers and account of the presidency and the presidential powers that is nonpartisan, that will transcend the identity of any particular occupant of that office. Tell us more about that ambition and what vision of the presidency and its constitutional powers your book offers.
Michael McConnell: [00:17:05] Yes. Thank you, Jeff. The, something that really concerns me about not just popular, but even some scholarly discussion of the presidency is how much people tend to weigh whether they like the particular president or not. And so many Republicans who profess to be disturbed at the unilateral actions of Barack Obama as president using the phone and the pen suddenly were enthusiastic about Donald Trump doing the same thing.
And I'm not looking forward to the case of whiplash that I am now, I'm expecting to get with all of the critics of Trump being unilateral executive power suddenly deciding that it's perfectly okay in the hands of a president that that they voted for and favored. If we're going to have a constitution as we do, the, the rules for institutions have to be the same for Republicans and Democrats, for people we think are demagogues, for people whom we think are are, are, are weak or, or whatever it might be.
The rules have to be a, the same across the board. Not just because that's a matter of constitutional fairness, but also because that means we should think about how these provisions about power might be interpreted and applied in hands we don't like, and that, that is itself going to be a disciplinary measure for the scholar or interpreter or judge that if we say presidents have a certain amount of power when we like that president, we like what that president is doing, what we need to do is anticipate a president we don't like using exactly the same power.
So just as a quick example of that. When President Carter unilaterally abrogated our mutual defense treaty with Taiwan, by and large Democrats thought that was great and Republicans thought that was terrible and the supreme court held, well, it's a very complicated holding, but essent, essentially said they're not going to get in the way, the president could do that. And that was a great, you know, victory and mostly on for the, for President Carter and, you know, the, and mostly on partisan lines.
And then, you know, President Bush unilaterally abrogated the ABM treaty and suddenly there were a lot of people regretting the Taiwan affair. Well, they should've thought about that in advance because the presidency does move from one party to another, from people we like to people we don't like, but the rules need to remain the same. That's going to be a tough lesson for a lot of Biden f fans, I'm afraid.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:19:57] Christina, what's your response to Michael's argument that both Democrats and Republicans should embrace a constrained vision of the presidency that they can tolerate, regardless of who's in the presidential chair?
Christina Rodriguez: [00:20:09] I definitely share Michael's concern and, and interest in with understanding the scope of executive power to be something that transcends the particular president who's in office and your interpretation of either what the constitution requires or what statutes require should not be driven by what outcomes you seek and who is in the position of power to make those outcomes come to fruition or who's in, in opposition.
And that's a challenge when there is a presidential administration to maintain that point of view if that presidential administration is one that consistently does things that not only are inconsistent with your policy preferences but seem to be destroying underlying norms that make government function. And that's, that's one of the things I think's made the Trump presidency uniquely difficult for people like my, myself who believe that the executive does have broad powers in a number of ways, that those can actually be constructive.
But it is important not to be outcome driven in the way that you understand the presidency, but also to understand regardless of who's in power, what the possibilities for abusive power consists of and, and therefore how the system, whether it's doctrine produced by courts was enacted by Congress or your understanding of administrative power should work against those potential abuses.
And this is at the same kind of problem one would confront when thinking about federalism, do we prefer centralized federal power or do we prefer state or local power? And there's a lot of back and forth between people who advocate strong local and state power when they don't like the central government and, and vice versa. And, and those are also unstable and unsatisfying and intellectual inconsistent arguments that, that get made.
I, I do think one way in which the Biden administration is going to find itself in a bit of a bind is because of a lot of the judicial doctrines that have developed over the last four years in response to perceived and real abuses by the Trump administration, it might in fact be harder for the, the Biden administration to exercise executive power in the same way that say the Obama administration did.
There might be more roadblocks that had been put into place because of a concern that power was not being exercised appropriately or because litigants made opportunistic arguments to try to stop Trump policies. And that could be a good thing, it might not be a good thing. But it, it doesn't really have as much to do with the proper understanding of executive powers as we might think or might like.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:22:38] Well, let's now put squarely on the table, Michael, your proposal for what a principal vision of executive power would be. You address, just as Robert Jackson's famous three part test for evaluating whether a presidential unilateral action is permissible or not and that has to do with whether or not Congress has clearly supported it or not, or whether they're, it's in the middle and there's a zone of twilight. And as an alternative, you propose a three-part approach which I won't summarize but will ask you to. So tell us how your approach differs from that of Justice Jackson and how you root it in the original understanding and original public meaning of the constitution.
Michael McConnell: [00:23:17] Yes. I want to stress that Justice Jackson's approach in the Youngstown steel seizure case has been praised to the skies by people right and left and has been adopted by the supreme court, embraced by the supreme court in majority opinions, I think five times now. So it is definitely the the status quo. But I think it's wrong, I think it's deeply misleading in a number of ways.
It is structured according to whether Congress and the president are in agreement on any particular matter. And if they are in agreement, then essentially for separation of powers purposes, everything's fine. If they, if they are in open disagreement, then for separation of powers purposes, the president basically loses. And if they're, if you don't really know if there's silence or uncertainty or ambiguity, then you're in what the what the court calls a zone of twilight in which contemporary imponderables will be will govern the answer to the question.
Well, I think, you know, all three of those things are basically wrong. I think that sometimes Congress cannot empower the president to do things. And even if they, even if both branches are o, on the same page, that they may be avoiding checks and balances that the constitution int, intended to impose. There aren't very many examples of that. I also think that there are times when the president has the right to go against Congress.
The Congress can pass laws, but Congress, but the president has certain powers. Our, our framers thought about this in terms of the categories of power that they knew under the British system and there was a category of power called prerogative powers of the crown. And those are powers which are vested in the executive by virtue of being king or president not by virtue of statute and that the parliament or the Congress can't touch.
They can't regulate it, they can't repeal it, they can't overrule it. Some clear examples of that under our system are the veto. The president can veto for any reason, no reason at all, bad reasons. It's the pardon power is another examples. You know, Lord knows you know, Trump is not the first president to use the pardon power in ways that seem extremely questionable but it's an absolute prerogative power.
Ca, the framers carefully considered each of the prerogative powers that pertained to the king and allocated them either to the president, a small number to the president, all of them explicitly, a large number of them to Congress, 13 of Congress's enumerated, 27 enumerated powers were actually prerogative powers of the king under the British system. So many of these they gave to Congress and some they said the federal government wouldn't be able to exercise at all, like the king's prerogative powers over the church of England.
So transporting that to the, to the pre, to Ja, Jackson's three-part Youngstown tasks, what we need to do is ask what kind of power the president purports to be exercising. If he is exercising a prerogative power under the constitution, then he has the right to do it no matter what we may think of the policy and no matter what Congress may have done. The fact that Congress disapproves is of no constitutional moment, right?
If it is a power, and there are many of these which is vested in Congress but can be delegated to the president, things like spending, Congress has to pass an appropriation, but then the president carries it out. Congress passes a, a criminal, a regulatory law and the executive branch administers it. But the president cannot, he can't tax anybody without a statute having been passed.
He can't spend a dime of money without, a, an appropriation having been passed. He can't impose any penalties, criminal or regulatory on anybody unless there's been a statute passed in advance. And so in this category, you, you see what kind of, if, if it's that kind of power, a delegated power, you see whether there Congress has delegated or not and gives a, a very clear answer and that zone of twilight into which so many cases fault just does not exist.
The Congress's silence doesn't lead to a zone of twilight. Rather if it's a prerogative power, we don't, Congress's silence means nothing. If it is a delegated power, then Congress's silence is a denial of power because co, the president requires the delegation before he can exercise it. No zone of twilight is left.
And in particular, this idea that the cour, that the courts will decide cases in this very large, they think zone of twilight according to contemporary imponderables is I think very objectionable. I mean, if they are genuinely imponderable, I don't understand how judges are supposed to ponder them, it seems like an oxymoron.
But contemporary imponderables to my mind is code for we'll just decide whether we like what the president did, will you exercise our judicial discretion according to contemporary, you know, turns of events and, and context? And that is a recipe for constitutional separation of powers laws. It varies from president to president and in which it's the political preferences of the justices that control rather than the constitution. I think that's a terrible system.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:29:18] Christina, what do you think of Michael's proposal that the distinction between prerogative and delegated powers is, is a better one than Jackson's three categories. And in particular, Michael's claim that Jackson's zone of twilight and its implication that sometimes congressional inertia, indifference or quiescence can enable or invite presidential acts that aren't authorized by the statutes of the constitution is misleading and dangerous.
Michael says that it's, was dangerous because Congress's failure to pass immigration reform didn't empower President Obama to fashion his own, its failure to fund a wall on the Mexican border did not empower President Trump to move funds from elsewhere, congressional inaction cannot authorize or invite anything. What are your thoughts?
Christina Rodriguez: [00:30:03] So when we get to Youngstown in my constitutional law class every fall, I get the most quizzical looks when the contemporary imponderables come up. [Laughs]. And I, I quite agree with Michael's analysis of the, of the zone of twilight, that it really shouldn't be a non-existent zone, that there's no source of power in that zone for the, the president to act and that the, the two sources of power for the president to act are statutes that delegate power and that is, consists of or today makes up a, a, a vast swath of the power that the president through the executive branch exercises and then those powers that are granted in the, the constitution.
And so that the opinions in the Youngstown case that confront those two questions are the ones that are thinking about it in the, the right fashion. I, I think what's constructive about the, the Youngstown framework though is the reinforcement of the view that when Congress has authorized the president to act, that there is a, a legitimacy to that and you could, this is not necessarily falling from Youngstown, understand that where there is a statutory delegation to the president to act or to one of his officials to act that there are reasons to interpret that broadly or robustly.
And within that domain, you could fit a lot of the contemporary arguments about deference to the executive and, and the liked arguments that are very much of the moment, the extent to which we should allow Congress to delegate to the president and the extent to which to defer to the choices that agencies make. On the subject of acquiescence, I, I'm also of the view that the fact that Congress has failed to act shouldn't lead to a conclusion about what Congress has authorized that just doesn't make sense.
And there can be any number of reasons for a failure to act and that can even consistent acquiescence in a practice doesn't mean that Congress can't come back and exert a power that has lain dormant for a long period of time and change the way that it allows the executive to, to behave. With respect to immigration, since you raised the subject, this is a, a point which Michael and I disagree and the characterization of what President Obama did under the immigration laws.
And it might in fact become relevant as the, the next administration tries to revive some of the same Obama era policies. And it's not that President Obama invented laws that Congress had failed to pass or claimed authority that Congress had failed to give him, but instead he was exercising quintessential executive authority in the way he chose to enforce the immigration law.
Authority that Congress could have come in to defeat or change or alter. And so Congress's failure to act there did empower the president, but it's not because the president was claiming something had been authorized by Congress's silences because he was exercising power that he had pursuant to statutes that had been enacted and, and constitutional authorities that existed.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:33:01] Thank you so much, Michael McConnell and Christina Rodriguez for a wonderful discussion. Thanks to Christina for her generous words about Michael's new book, The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution. And thank you both for joining We the People to model what it means to transcend partisanship and to have a civil and meaningful constitutional discussion that spreads much constitutional light. Michael, Christina, thank you so much for joining.
Michael McConnell: [00:33:31] Thank you.
Christina Rodriguez: [00:33:32] Thank you.
