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THE CONSERVATIVE INSURGENCY AND
PRESIDENTIAL
POWER: A DEVELOPMENTAL
PERSPECTIVE
ON THE UNITARY EXECUTIVE
by Stephen Skowronek [
Full Text ] |
| 122 Harv. L. Rev. 2070 (2009) |
| This Essay traces successive elaborations through to the most
recent construction of presidential power, the conservative
insurgency’s “unitary executive.” Work on this
construction began in the 1970s and 1980s during the transition from
progressive to conservative dominance of the national agenda. A budding
conservative legal movement took up the doctrinal challenge as an
adjunct to the larger cause, and in the 1990s, it emerged with a fully
elaborated constitutional theory. After 2001, aggressive,
self-conscious advocacy of the unitary theory in the Administration of
George W. Bush put a fine point on its practical implications. Much has
been written about this theory in recent years, but virtually all of
the commentary is by legal scholars seeking to adjudicate the
constitutional merits of the case. That is to say, commentators have
been debating the soundness of the theory’s claims as an
interpretation of texts and precedents. The objective here is
different. It is to situate the theory in the long line of insurgent
constructions and to address it more directly as a political instrument
and a developmental phenomenon. |
| The guiding assumption of this analysis is that a new construction
of the presidency gains currency when it legitimizes the release of
governmental power for new political purposes. I do not mean to suggest
that candid reckoning with construction as a political process disposes
of the constitutional claims of the unitary theory or of any other
theory for that matter. I contextualize these claims in order to bring
other issues to the fore. Significance is to be found in the practical
political problems that conservative insurgents had to confront in
venting their ambitions, in the sequence of prior constructions on
which their response to these problems was built, and in the cumulative
effects of the developmental process of construction itself. [More] |
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