America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power

Free Thoughts
E29 -

Gene Healy joins us to talk about the growing power of the Executive Branch. What are the President’s actual duties according to the U.S. Constitution?

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Hosts
Trevor Burrus
Research Fellow, Constitutional Studies
Aaron Ross Powell
Director and Editor
Guests
Gene Healy

Gene Healy is senior vice president for policy at the Cato Institute. His research interests include executive power and the role of the presidency as well as federalism and overcriminalization.

He is the author of Indispensable Remedy: The Broad Scope of the Constitution’s Impeachment Power and The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power and is editor of Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything. He also contributed a chapter to Libertarianism.org’s Visions of Liberty.

Healy has appeared on PBS NewsHour and NPR’s Talk of the Nation, and his work has been published in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Legal Times, and elsewhere.

Healy holds a BA from Georgetown University and a JD from the University of Chicago Law School.

What does Article 2 of the Constitution say about the powers of the Executive Branch? How did we get to where we are now, with the executive wielding so much discretionary power? And is there anything we can do about it? Gene Healy, vice president of the Cato Institute and author of The Cult of the Presidency and False Idol joins us to answer these questions and more about America’s most popular branch of government.

Show Notes and Further Reading

F. H. Buckley, The Once and Future King (book)

Juan Linz, The Perils of Presidentialism (article)

Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (book)

Gawker Video at 2012 Democratic National Conference, “Ask the DNC: Is Romney Ready for the Kill List?” (video)

Theodore Lowi, The Personal President: Power Invested, Promise Unfulfilled (book)

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Rating the Presidents: Washington to Clinton (article)

Siena College Research Institute Presidential Ranking Survey

U.S. News and World Report, The 10 Worst Presidents (article)