Constitutional scholars Ilya Shapiro, Stephen Vladeck, and Adam White join NCC President and CEO Jeffrey Rosen to debate whether the Trump administration has overreached on executive power, analyze the relationship between the federal courts and the president, and put the present moment in historical context. This conversation was originally recorded on May 21, 2025, at George Washington’s Mount Vernon.
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Today’s episode was produced by Samson Mostashari and Bill Pollock. It was engineered by Bill Pollock and William Hutchison. Research was provided by Samson Mostashari and Gyuha Lee. Thanks to George Washington’s Mount Vernon and the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association for making this conversation possible.
Participants
Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. Previously he was executive director and senior lecturer at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, and before that a vice president of the Cato Institute. Shapiro is the author of Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites (2025) and Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court (2020)
Stephen Vladeck is a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, and is a nationally recognized expert on the federal courts, the Supreme Court, national security law, and military justice. Vladeck is author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic. Vladeck is CNN’s Supreme Court analyst and editor and author of “One First,” a popular weekly newsletter about the Supreme Court.
Adam White is the Laurence H. Silberman Chair in Constitutional Governance and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on the Supreme Court and the administrative state. Concurrently, he codirects the Antonin Scalia Law School’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State. Before joining AEI, he was a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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.
Additional Resources
- J. Michael Luttig, “The End of Rule of Law in America,” The Atlantic (May 14, 2025)
- Stephen Vladeck, “What the Courts Can Still Do to Constrain Trump,” The Atlantic (April 15, 2025)
- Ilya Shapiro, “Don’t Throw My Executive Power in That Briar Patch!,” Shapiro’s Gavel Substack (April 24, 2025)
- Adam White, “WTH Is Going On with Birthright Citizenship? Adam White Explains,” WTH Is Going On podcast (Jan. 30, 2025)
Excerpt from interview: Stephen Vladeck stresses the importance of due process and separation of powers in maintaining the American system of government.
Stephen Vladeck: I suspect that Adam and Ilya and I are all in violent agreement that the long-term cause of the moment we're in is the abdication by Congress of its various responsibilities. We might prefer to see Congress flex its muscles in different ways, but that the sort of the inevitable head-on conflicts between the executive and the courts is a function largely of congressional abdication. I just... I can't get off this stage without making the point that there is something to me fundamental about due process in the American system and that the notion... And that part of why I think the immigration cases have resonated more than Humphrey's Executor, more than the tariff cases, even though those might actually have more of a direct impact on everyday Americans' lives, is because I think at an intuitive, instinctual level, Americans actually do understand what due process is. And I just think that we have not seen this kind of assault on both the principle of due process and the idea that courts should play a role in promoting it in a long time.
Excerpt from interview: Adam White emphasizes the importance of executive self-restraint following the example of George Washington and others.
Adam White: What worries me about the situation, and again, it's because it's all centered around presidential politics, Congress has left the stage. I'm holding this, and I just wanna point this out. This state, this farewell address, and the other part of the bookend of the Washington administration is his first inaugural address. They are both in words and in the way he presented themselves, they are an argument for self-restraint, right? There is so much in here about duty, starting with the inaugural oath in his inaugural address, and over and over again, returning to the theme that there were higher powers and higher principles that he was bound by. And so much of the farewell address is trying to account for how he carried that out in his government, and urging the country going forward to have self-restraint in a spirit of union.
And what worries me the most about this era of presidential-centered politics, which again goes back decades upon decades, is that we have all of the power without any of the self-restraint, and without any of the spirit of self-restraint among those who put the wind in the sails of these presidents. If there's going to be a constitutional crisis, it's going to be that. It's gonna be a crisis of political ambition in the presidency with no spirit of self-restraint, 'cause ultimately, the courts can't save us from ourselves. Congress can't save us from ourselves. The only thing that we have is the republican virtues of self-restraint that Madison, Hamilton, Washington, and others, they said we needed, and they showed that we needed. And that's what I worry is draining out of our political system. If we have a crisis, it'll be from that.
Excerpt from interview: Ilya Shapiro believes that we are not in a constitutional crisis and that President Trump does not represent the founders’ fear of a Caesar-like consolidation of power.
Ilya Shapiro: Trump is neither Andrew Jackson, who famously, if apocryphally, said that John Marshall has made his ruling, let him now enforce it. Nor is he Julius Caesar, just kind of some sort of autocrat. We have constant court rulings every which way. The administration wins some on the merits, it wins some procedurally, it loses some on the merits, loses some procedurally. This is kind of the messy give and take of what's going on.
The things that people point to, I get constantly asked, I was having a discussion at my table about... The thing I get most asked about by reporters these days is, are we in a constitutional crisis? How will we know if we're in one? Is it kind of a gradual boiling the frog? Is it an up and down switch? The things that people most point to are these one-off individuals being removed from the country for the wrong reasons, either without due process or administrative error or what have you, which is fair enough. It's bad, but it doesn't seem like the downfall of the republic. And then these other things that I would personally point to as just brash ignorance or avoidance of the law and prolonging the bipartisan past TikTok divestiture rule, as well as the blatant abuse of the Emergency Economic Authorization Act, the tariffs and all that.
But that doesn't match the political narrative because there's cross-cutting ideological positions over this. I guess everybody's kids has TikTok, so they don't wanna take a strong stance, even though Congress voted on it, what have you. But at the end of the day, I think what we have is a president who has a definite vision and the legal manifestation of a political cultural vibe shift that is rubbing people the wrong way, particularly at a time when we have the culmination of several trends where divergent interpretive theories or constitutional visions map onto partisan preference at a time when the parties are more ideologically sorted and polarized than since at least the Civil War.
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