With all the consolidations that trump and his thug Elmo are doing to this government it looks like a push for a unitary government….I recently wrote about this opportunity for the boyz in the Trump administration to enact a new form of American government.
What could go wrong right?
This should answer many questions that have lingered since my original post….
Before going into detail, it’s worth emphasizing what unitary executive theory (UET) is – and what it is not. UET is a theory of the distribution of executive power, not a theory of its scope. Even if all or nearly all executive authority is concentrated in the hands of the president, its scope could potentially still be quite narrow, if the total amount of executive power is very limited. For example, even if UET is correct, the Trump administration’s multifaceted effort to usurp the spending power is still unconstitutional, because the power of the purse is not an executive power at all. It belongs to Congress.
Still, the modern scope of executive power is very broad, in large part because the federal government has intruded into so many areas beyond what it was supposed to control under the original meaning of the Constitution. And that undermines the case for UET.
In some ways, the originalist case for a unitary executive is as compelling as ever. Article II of the Constitution states that “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” It does not say that executive power can be divided between the branches of government or given to bureaucratic agencies independent of presidential control. This strongly implies that he is supposed to have all the power given to the executive branch, except such as is specifically allocated elsewhere in other parts of the Constitution.
If the executive branch still wielded only the relatively narrow range of powers it had at the time of the Founding, the case for the unitary executive would be pretty strong (at least on originalist grounds). Unfortunately, however, the current scope of executive authority goes far beyond that. To take just one noteworthy example, the president now presides over a vast federal law-enforcement apparatus, much of it devoted to waging the War on Drugs (which accounts for the lion’s share of federal prosecutions and prisoners). Under the original meaning of the Constitution – and the dominant understanding of the first 150 years of American history – the federal government did not have the power to ban in-state possession and distribution of goods. That’s why it took a constitutional amendment to establish federal alcohol Prohibition in 1919. Giving the president control over the waging of the federal War on Drugs is giving him a power the federal government was never supposed to have in the first place. Immigration is another field where the executive now wields vast power, despite the fact that, as James Madison and others pointed out, the original meaning of the Constitution actually did not give the federal government any general power to restrict migration into the United States.
https://reason.com/volokh/2025/03/02/perils-of-unitary-executive-theory/
I my opinion the unitary executive theory(UET) should be fought with every fiber of our being for it is not what this country was founded on….the checks and balances that have worked for us for over 200 years is slowly being eaten away and giving rise this abortion called UET.
Will you stand by and do nothing?
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”