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The unitary executive theory first went mainstream during the George W. Bush administration as the president's justification for exercising broad executive powers. Barack Obama did not explicitly embrace the unitary executive theory, but he followed in Bush's footsteps by expanding and augmenting presidential power in new and questionable ways. President Donald J. Trump's campaign rhetoric, coupled with an early, controversial executive order on immigration, suggest the possibility of continued expansions of executive power. Thus, the time is right to examine the unitary executive theory anew. Here, we define the theory as understood by its advocates and then offer a critique. Finally, we highlight the theory's impact on the evolution of presidential powers over the past 16 years and set the stage for evaluating what may come next.

Keywords: unitary executive theory, executive power, Article II powers, presidential power, separation of powers, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald J. Trump, Federalist Papers

It has been over 10 years since the unitary executive theory first went mainstream during the George W. Bush administration as the president's preferred vehicle for justifying broad executive powers. Since then it has become a critically important topic for scholarly analysis. In a recent book, political scientist John P. Burke catalogued the unitary executive near more established theories of executive power, specifically, "presidential prerogative" as expressed by Abraham Lincoln ("life and limb" theory), Theodore Roosevelt's "stewardship" theory, and William Howard Taft's "literalist" theory (Burke 2016, chap. 3). Lincoln exercised both executive and legislative powers during the Civil War, but he later sought congressional approval for doing so (Crouch and Rozell 2005, 306-07). Taft's "literalist" theory, where the president's actions would be closely tied to constitutional grants of power, clashed with his predecessor's more expansive view that the president should be able to act unless the Constitution dictated otherwise. We believe that the unitary executive theory is an example of the stewardship theory run amok. Of the four theories, it is potentially the most wide ranging-and therefore the most dangerous-of them all.

Presidents acting according to the unitary executive theory tend to make broad claims for power, which leads to one of two general outcomes. First, the system of checks and balances does not effectively push back against these claims, which then quickly become...

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