Jack N. Rakove
Jack Norman Rakove is an American historian, author, and professor at Stanford University. He is a Pulitzer Prize winner.
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True. But the point in contention was SCOTUS’s gross misstatement of a basic constitutional matter, not the fecklessness of Congress.
A simpler way to put it is that while the executive branch conducts relations with foreign governments, the foreign policy of the US in respect to commerce tariffs, and foreign aid is determined by Congress acting legislatively. It's not done by presidential diktat, fiat, or ukase.
This is a ridiculously broad understanding of the President's foreign affairs powers -- that the Executive Branch experiences "harms to [its] conduct of foreign affairs" when it is must spend foreign aid money appropriated in a bill signed by the President. Whither Congress's power of the purse?
by Jack N. Rakove — Reposted by: Robert J. Spitzer
The main point UE advocates neglect is that the Framers emphasized responsibility as the key duty and perpetual obligation of a unitary executive while the ostensible virtues of energy, vigor, dispatch, and secrecy were only advantages of decision-making that would be exercised only occasionally..
jamelle
@jamellebouie.net
· 16d
Reposted by: Jack N. Rakove, David R. Miller, Mark Rice
genuinely crazy to me how unitary executive advocates read the vesting clause as granting a huge scope of essentially royal "inherent" powers. one would think that if the framers intended to give the president royal authority, they would have just said so.
Some counterfactual musings for our 238th Constitution Day (hopefully not our last, but who knows?). A few typos have to be corrected, hopefully before you awaken, but it should give you something serious to think about (exactly what we don't need).
washingtonmonthly.com/2025/09/17/c...
washingtonmonthly.com/2025/09/17/c...
The Great Might-Have-Been of the Constitutional Convention
The U.S. Senate and the nation's history might different if the Constitutional Convention had structured the chamber differently.
washingtonmonthly.com
As I have argued previously, when one is living as we are in an ongoing constitutional crisis, that term loses its analytical meaning. The better term is constitutional failure, meaning that our institutions are no longer capable of fulfilling their responsibilities.
👇🎯 Folks look at you like you’re crazy when you say we’re in the midst of the worst Article I constitutional crisis in 🇺🇸 history, & then, well, 👇🤷♂️
certainly a typo and not a F-slip, though perhaps the concept is worth exploring in a dystopian key
Not sure we have to go that far, Erin, but if one thinks of federalism as an inherently flexible system, there are lot of ways to imagine redistributing functions. A comprehensive health scare system based on the Pacific states would be feasible financially and strong on the research side as well.
by Jack N. Rakove — Reposted by: Robert J. Spitzer
Proud to contribute an essay on "A Brief Biography of the Second Amendment" to this amazing collection.
www.vitalcitynyc.org/issues/issue...
www.vitalcitynyc.org/issues/issue...
Vital City | Issue 13
The supply side of America's gun problem
www.vitalcitynyc.org
Interesting questions and a lot to speculate on. An Articles of Confederation-style emphasis on "internal police" would have interesting implications for tax policy. But as you note, the deeper division is not between states but rather between different kinds of communities.
So the challenge today would be, how would the US maintain its status as a superpower while allowing red and blue states to go their own ways domestically. As a Californian, I could feel sympathy (an important topic in 18th c. thinking, see Adam Smith TMS) for red state residents, but so what?
he underlying conception of the Articles was that states would control their internal police. The underlying problem of the Articles was that the states were failing to fulfill their federal obligations. (Cf. item 7 of Madison's Vices of the Political System of the U. States).
This is a really smart piece which draws some strong inferences about the deteriorating condition of the federal Union. As a historian of the Articles of Confederation (my first book), I have wondered if its model of governance might be a better option for us now.
www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...
www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...
Red and Blue States’ Fight Is Reaching a Dangerous Level
We’re seeing the greatest strain on the nation’s cohesion since the Civil War.
www.bloomberg.com
Now I get it. My sister is the only pro-feline member of our family. We had one dog in my youth, named for my dad's mentor, Hans Morgenthau. Had an awkward incident when he came to our house for lunch once, Hans put his paws on the table, and I said, Hans, get down.
It is hardly unique to Baker, though. Prerogative is often used generically, without awareness of its specific historical usage. But if you're not aware of that history, you won't fully understand what is at stake constitutionally.
Which is why I find myself thinking we're back in a 17th-c. world, where what John Adams called "the execrable race of Stuarts" has been replaced by "the execrable race of Trumps."
Over the centuries, the House of Commons had won various PRIVILEGES--e.g., the right to initiate legislation, to have its members be free from arrest. Our current Congress, with its craven feckless leadership (arguably in both parties) is renouncing or forfeiting its privileges.
by Jack N. Rakove — Reposted by: Aviel Roshwald
There is a curious but common misstatement here. PREROGATIVE was something that always belonged to the Crown. Americans are still arguing how much of the royal prerogative was incorporated in the presidency. This is a big component of the spurious United Executive Theory.
Reposted by: Jack N. Rakove
Trump's administration further erodes the power of Congress, trampling on its constitutional prerogatives in ways large and small as Republicans in charge mostly shrug and at times even applaud the loss of their own authority. @julianbarnes @CatieEdmondson www.nytimes.com/2025/09/07/u...
Trump Tramples Congress’s Power, With Little Challenge From G.O.P.
www.nytimes.com
Norm's account of his essay is, if anything, too modest.
I will stay away from both those alternatives, s.v.p. But at least I have read Frances Yates Rosicrucian Enlightenment, which my mentor (B. Bailyn) was a big fan of.
I'm thinking about the academics rather than the judges (e.g., Larry Solum), who seem to think that a pure linguistic meaning exists independently of its practice in ordinary conversation or (let's say) political deliberation. To the working historian, this seems like nonsense, but what do I know?
The "highest stages" of semantic or public meaning originalism seem to embidy a neo-Platonic approach to constitutional interpretation. Whether this is occult or not is something I've not yet reckoned with. It is wholly indifferent to questions of the political origins of most clauses.
I could have added that (a) I ignored the New Yorker's advice to "block that metaphor"; (b) I once saw a modernist version of Gotterdammerung at the Kennedy Center with RBG in attendance; and (c) I have lots of ties to Albany, my wife's hometown.