Fourteen men have served as President of the United States since Franklin D. Roosevelt left office, and almost all of them have been imperial presidents in the FDR mode. This is true of Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan, Bush the Elder, Clinton, Bush the Younger, Obama, Trump, Biden, and now Trump again. All of them except for Presidents Carter, Obama, and Biden have endorsed unlimited presidential removal power and/or have read the Vesting Clause of Article I, together with the Take Care Clause as a constitutional grant of the power to execute the laws to the president. Steven G. Calabresi & Christopher S. Yoo, The Unitary Executive: Presidential Power from Washington to Bush (Yale University Press 2008).
In today's blog post, I will describe the ways in which FDR's four immediate successors, Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson either challenged Humphrey's Executor and/or insisted that the Vesting Clause of Article II, together with the Take Care Clause, is a grant of the power to execute the laws to the president. In doing this, I rely on my above-cited book with Professor Christopher S. Yoo, who deserves all the credit and none of the blame for this blog post.
President Harry S. Truman began his presidency by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's hard to believe that fourteen presidents since Truman, each of whom has had the power to blow up the world unilaterally, could not be trusted to fire a Federal Trade Commissioner.
