This one-of-a-kind guide provides a crash course in the laws governing the President of the United States. In an engaging and accessible style, two law professors explain the principles that inform everything from President Washington's disagreements with Congress to President Trump's struggles with the courts, and more. Timely and to the point, this guide provides the essential information every informed civic participant needs to know about the laws that govern the president-and what those laws mean for those who want to make their voices heard.

The Law of the Executive Branch: Presidential Power places the law of the executive branch firmly in the context of constitutional language, framers' intent, and more than two centuries of practice. Each provision of the US Constitution is analyzed to reveal its contemporary meaning and in concert with the application of presidential power.

For this new edition, Louis Fisher has updated his arguments to include critiques of the Clinton & Bush presidencies, particularly the Use of Force Act, the Iraq Resolution of 2002, the 'preemption doctrine' of the current U.S. administration, & the order authorizing military tribunals.

"Presidential power is hotly disputed these days - as it has been many times in recent decades. Yet the same rules must apply to all presidents, those whose abuses of power we fear as well as those whose exercises of power we applaud. This book is about what constitutional law tells us about presidential power and its limits. It is very difficult to strike the right balance between limiting abuse of power and authorizing its exercise when needed. This book advocates a balanced, pragmatic approach to these issues, rooted in history and Supreme Court rulings"--

This book explores how American presidents--especially those of the past three decades--have increased the power of the presidency at the expense of democracy.

Can a U.S. president decide to hold suspected terrorists indefinitely without charges or secretly monitor telephone conversations and e-mails without a warrant in the interest of national security? Was the George W. Bush administration justified in authorizing waterboarding? Was President Obama justified in ordering the killing, without trial or hearing, of a U.S. citizen suspected of terrorist activity? Defining the scope and limits of emergency presidential power might seem easy—just turn to Article II of the Constitution. But as Chris Edelson shows, the reality is complicated. In times of crisis, presidents have frequently staked out claims to broad national security power. Ultimately it is up to the Congress, the courts, and the people to decide whether presidents are acting appropriately or have gone too far. Drawing on excerpts from the U.S. Constitution, Supreme Court opinions, Department of Justice memos, and other primary documents, Edelson weighs the various arguments that presidents have used to justify the expansive use of executive power in times of crisis. Emergency Presidential Power uses the historical record to evaluate and analyze presidential actions before and after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The choices of the twenty-first century, Edelson concludes, have pushed the boundaries of emergency presidential power in ways that may provide dangerous precedents for current and future commanders-in-chief. Winner, Crader Family Book Prize in American Values, Department of History and Crader Family Endowment for American Values, Southeast Missouri State University

Vital perspectives for the divided Trump era on what the Constitution's framers intended when they defined the extent—and limits—of presidential power One of the most vexing questions for the framers of the Constitution was how to create a vigorous and independent executive without making him king. In today's divided public square, presidential power has never been more contested. The President Who Would Not Be King cuts through the partisan rancor to reveal what the Constitution really tells us about the powers of the president. Michael McConnell provides a comprehensive account of the drafting of presidential powers. Because the framers met behind closed doors and left no records of their deliberations, close attention must be given to their successive drafts. McConnell shows how the framers worked from a mental list of the powers of the British monarch, and consciously decided which powers to strip from the presidency to avoid tyranny. He examines each of these powers in turn, explaining how they were understood at the time of the founding, and goes on to provide a framework for evaluating separation of powers claims, distinguishing between powers that are subject to congressional control and those in which the president has full discretion. Based on the Tanner Lectures at Princeton University, The President Who Would Not Be King restores the original vision of the framers, showing how the Constitution restrains the excesses of an imperial presidency while empowering the executive to govern effectively.

Who controls American immigration policy? The biggest immigration controversies of the last decade have all involved policies produced by the President policies such as President Obama's decision to protect Dreamers from deportation and President Trump's proclamation banning immigrants from several majority-Muslim nations. While critics of these policies have been separated by a vast ideological chasm, their broadsides have embodied the same widely shared belief: that Congress, not the President, ought to dictate who may come to the United States and who will be forced to leave. This belief is a myth. In The President and Immigration Law, Adam B. Cox and Cristina M. Rodríguez chronicle the untold story of how, over the course of two centuries, the President became our immigration policymaker-in-chief. Diving deep into the history of American immigration policy from founding-era disputes over deporting sympathizers with France to contemporary debates about asylum-seekers at the Southern border they show how migration crises, real or imagined, have empowered presidents. Far more importantly, they also uncover how the Executive's ordinary power to decide when to enforce the law, and against whom, has become an extraordinarily powerful vehicle for making immigration policy. This pathbreaking account helps us understand how the United States ?has come to run an enormous shadow immigration system-one in which nearly half of all noncitizens in the country are living in violation of the law. It also provides a blueprint for reform, one that accepts rather than laments the role the President plays in shaping the national community, while also outlining strategies to curb the abuse of law enforcement authority in immigration and beyond.

The Constitution Under Siege is a provocative teaching instrument that uses law, history, and politics to test what the law arguably "is" against assertions of what it "ought" to be. It examines the questionable impulses of presidents, members of Congress, the military, and intelligence agencies to bend or break the Constitution and the laws. In questioning the legitimacy of raw assertions of unaccountable power, the editors reject both the illustrative case approach of political scientists and precedent-driven approach of lawyers, supplementing key court cases with historically-rich essays, notes, and questions. These essays explain where our nation's "first principles" came from, and why they became imbedded, at least until recently, in our laws and institutions. Above all, these materials will prompt the reader to ask how, and by what authority, presidents, Congress, and even courts have come to allow the military and secret agencies to kidnap, torture, assassinate, or secretly detain citizens or aliens, and to use military and para-military force without running afoul of the Constitution and its Bill of Rights. "This superb book, written by two of the nation's most acute analysts of law and politics, provides readers with materials indispensable to an understanding of the many dubious assertions of governmental power, by both presidents and Congress, that have rocked the foundations of our republic. ... It is must reading for all those concerned about the future of constitutional government." -- David Gray Adler, James McClure Professor of Public Policy at the University of Idaho "The Constitution Under Siege offers unparalleled insights arising from the authors' singular mastery of documents, events, and law. From the Barbary pirates to Islamic terrorism, no single source more definitively instructs the reader as it interweaves American law and policy abroad. This is an indispensable book." -- Robert J. Spitzer, Distinguished Service Professor, SUNY, Cortland

Reveals how the U.S. Supreme Court's presidentialism threatens our democracy and what to do about it. Donald Trump's presidency made many Americans wonder whether our system of checks and balances would prove robust enough to withstand an onslaught from a despotic chief executive. In The Specter of Dictatorship, David Driesen analyzes the chief executive's role in the democratic decline of Hungary, Poland, and Turkey and argues that an insufficiently constrained presidency is one of the most important systemic threats to democracy. Driesen urges the U.S. to learn from the mistakes of these failing democracies. Their experiences suggest, Driesen shows, that the Court must eschew its reliance on and expansion of the "unitary executive theory" recently endorsed by the Court and apply a less deferential approach to presidential authority, invoked to protect national security and combat emergencies, than it has in recent years. Ultimately, Driesen argues that concern about loss of democracy should play a major role in the Court's jurisprudence, because loss of democracy can prove irreversible. As autocracy spreads throughout the world, maintaining our democracy has become an urgent matter.