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Jack B. Greenberg and John A. Dearborn, "Congressional Expectations of Presidential Self-Restraint" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
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A
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B
Be not therefore anxious for the morrow. Matthew chapter 6. Each day will have its troubles, but by God's grace they can be survived.
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A
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C
Hello, this is Lily Goren with the New Books Network, the New Books in Political Science podcast. And today I'm joined by two of my friends in Presidential studies, Jack Greenberg and John Dearborn, who are going to talk to us about a short publication published by Cambridge Elements, part of Cambridge University Press in 2025 entitled Congressional Exp. Expectations of Presidential Self Restraint. And I say this is short because it has few pages in it and it's very good and it makes complex arguments in a short amount of space, which is impressive. But I'm going to ask John and Jack to tell us both a little bit about how they came to this project and then the publication series itself, and then we'll dive into the substance of the books. So I'd like to welcome Jack Greenberg and John Dearborn to the New Books in Political Science podcast. And please tell us a little bit about yourselves and how you came to this particular project.
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B
Thank you so much for having us on, Lily. It's an honor to be your colleague and your friend. So the origin story of this book was. I'll give you a little bit of the autobiographical portion of this. First, I had been interested as a second third year grad student in wanting to say something about self restraint, and I had spent a lot of time thinking about it on a conceptual level. I had had cases of presidential self restraint, some of which went back into the 19th century. But the problem I was continuously running into was how is against what benchmark are we defining self restraint? Where is it that we know the President is actually restraining himself versus there's some other compelling political motivation that is, it's not that so much that he's restraining himself in relation to one goal. He's just actually trying to pursue something else. And as I did with many problems that I had in life at the time, I turned to my senior colleague and friend John Dearborn, who provided the critical intervention here to say, well, what if we get away from what the problem is President is defining as his interest, or trying to go in and divine the President's interest? What if instead there were a clear external benchmark for what self restraint would mean? What if you were to bring Congress into the fold here to say, you know, here's the expectation that Congress has for the President's behavior in relation to the powers that he possesses, to what extent do we see those expectations upheld? And from there, that was the start of our collaboration on this project and one that it's been amazing to ultimately see come to fruition.
- [04:54]
D
Likewise. Thanks so much for having us on, Lily. So, as Jack said, this idea very much was spurred on by him figuring out a dissertation topic and thinking about some really big picture issues of, you know, things like under what conditions would presidents potentially not try to push their power to the limit? And I particularly remember, you know, as he was presenting on some of his thoughts about this just being like, you know, this was right after Stephen Skronik, Des King and I had finished our co authored book, Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic. So I had issues like Trump's firing of the FBI director. Cases like that just kind of on my mind. And I remember being like, I feel like there's a congressional angle to Jack's story, what he's thinking about here. And then, you know, as we kind of talked about that a little bit, Jack proposed that we work on this together. And I should say, you know, at the time that we started working on, on this, we thought it was going to be an article. And so, you know, we first initially did this as a paper for the 2022American Political Science association conference. And then we had a little bit of a brief pause on that, not the least of which is because I was on parental leave with my son. And I think actually maybe I, maybe maybe Jack would agree with this. I don't know. I think that actually might have benefited us a bit because by the time we kind of were able to fully take this up again, we had started to think like, based on feedback we were from folks, based on our own sense of what kind of cases we could bring into the project, that we had more to say that would make it, frankly, a little bit too long for an article, both in terms of the concept itself and especially the kinds of case studies we would need to demonstrate, you know, laws in which Congress actually set expectations of presidential self restraint. So in late 2023 and early 2024, we started to put together a proposal to send to Cambridge and the series editor, Francis lee. And in 2024 was when we started to engage the press in that process, did a proposal, you know, lengthened out the whole project and pretty much finished it. There were some, there were some changes that were made in 2025 to take accounts of early developments in the second Trump administration. But that's kind of how it grew from article into, into short book.
- [07:21]
C
And, and it is a very good short book because it does have a whole group of case studies question from the congressional angle to try to see what Congress was up to when they were writing legislation about presidential powers. But I did want to ask you a follow up question about this Cambridge Elements American Politics series, because there's quite a grouping of texts that have now been published in it. Can you just talk for a minute or two about this particular series?
- [07:56]
B
And speaking, I think we both agree on this, the series does a great job of allowing you to what John was getting at earlier. There are certain contributions where you to empirically demonstrate what you want to say, to get it a little bit of the theoretic complexity with which you're grappling. You want to have more than the length of a standard article. All the while, you want to put a premium on efficient presentation. You want to get the exact details of the cases that you want out. You want to bring in the history that's important, but you want to do so insofar as it's going to motivate the specific social scientific claim that you have in mind. And that's what the element forces you to do. The cap on them typically is 30,000 words. So we were thinking strategically about wanting to achieve. Achieve breadth. We had a lot of cases that we thought explored important variation in our concept. We wanted to cover a decent temporal range as well. We wanted to talk about a couple of contrast cases. But we got to do so in a way that forced us to think about, like, what are the relevant parameters in each of these cases and how much evidence do we need to bring to bear to establish exactly that. And I think it was useful for us. You know, a lot of work that has more of a developmental flavor to it can get long, often rightfully so. I think you just think about my own kind of academic, scholarly, professional development having that as a hard cap in there. 30,000 words, I think lent itself to a better argument than if it were. We were just kind of left to, you know, right. As much as we may have wanted initially wanted to.
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D
I would also add to that one of the goals of the series, as I understand it, is to try to, you know, obviously the publication. Publication process and production process takes time, but they're pretty dedicated to trying to turn around things relatively quickly. So like the review process of the proposal, the review process of the manuscript itself was, I thought, impressively fast, but yet as thorough as you would expect. And then once we actually submitted the final manuscript, which, the final version we submitted, I think in December 2024, and again we made a couple adjustments in copy editing and proofs to take into account a few cruc early trump moves. But. But, you know, it was online by April 2025 in print by, I think, May. So like, the. The production time was really fast. And the goal of that is that they want to be able to take elements that have a kind of contemporary connection and get them out there so that scholarly contributions that can say something about the state of the world are recognized sooner. And that was something that we really appreciated and thought was helpful for this particular project.
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B
Absolutely.
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C
And I really found that useful because you do sort of plug in a couple of the examples from the early second Trump administration in the conclusion that sort of fleshes out some of the complications in the argument that you're making. So let's get into that argument. And so for people who are listening, the idea here is that there's a concept of presidential self restraint in terms of the actions of the president, correct?
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B
Yes. It's this idea that the way we define presidential self restraint is that there will be formal power that is available to the President that Congress is expecting the President will not fully deploy. And there they will have an institutional arrangement in mind. They will have an expectation for how, let's say, you know, an important executive branch official will operate. And that is that understanding that expectation of their behavior is contingent on the President restraining himself.
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C
And so in that regard. John, you want us to jump in? Go ahead.
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D
Oh, no, I'm sorry. If I, if I can add one thing to that, I think it's helpful. I know I'm sure you have cases that you have in mind to ask us about, but I think it's often helpful to kind of put an example on defining this concept in action. So I mentioned the FBI director is something that had actually occurred to me early when Jack and I were sort of exploring this idea together. And so the FBI statute, as it was amended in 1976, gives the FBI director a 10 year term in statute, but it doesn't try to do something like give the FBI Director a formal four cause removal, protection from being fired by the President. So if you think about that just theoretically for a second, what you see is while Congress is indicating they don't generally want the President to fire this person, but they are still acknowledging the President has the formal authority to fire that person. So there's an implicit expectation just in the design of the legislation. But when we looked at the case and other cases like it, we actually found that members of Congress themselves explicitly sort of recognized the logic of what they were doing. So you had people like Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia acknowledging that while he wanted the 10 year term to indicate the FBI Director was supposed to be insulated from political pressure, at the same time, he explicitly acknowledged that the President could remove the Director at any time for any reason. And so they're relying on the President not to use legal authority that they acknowledge he possesses.
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C
And so when we start to talk about this sort of concept of presidential self restraint, this also gets at the heart of executive power and the power that's vested in the president and the executive branch to a degree by Article 2 of the Constitution. So can you explain a little bit about sort of these tensions? Because this gets into this discussion and understanding of unitary executive theory.
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B
So we have a three pronged developmental argument that we carry out across the, across the element. And one, maybe the piece that's most relevant to your question there, Lily, is about presidentialism, which is one kind of core feature of political development over the, the half century that we're covering is that there is a greater embrace of presidential power. You could argue that on the societal level, more relevant for our purposes is that the legislature across both parties increasingly buys into the idea that there's just more, more power that the president ought to have. So under that condition, then you could very well see circumstances where Congress is going to be more deferential to what the president wants to do with his power ground in the idea. It's like, well, this, this is the rightful place for power to belong and this is an issue that we, we don't want to tackle. So there's a risk there that if we kind of continue on that trend where it's all right, well, Congress is more increasingly willing to shift power over to the President, those expectations for self restraint then can get increasingly outmoded. It's like, well, how salient is self restraint then? If it's like, well, we're giving you a lot of power anyways.
- [15:11]
D
Yeah, to, to just build a little bit on, on what Jack said about our developmental account. So I mean, at a basic level, as you point out, like, there's probably always, you know, a degree of reliance on self restraint in, in any kind of executive, because you probably don't want officials pushing the limits of their formal power in every circumstance. One of the broader concepts we drew on from the literature in thinking about this was the concept of institutional forbearance that comes up in the, in the book How Democracies Die. But you know, in our particular case, focusing on, on the President and Congress, as Jack said, one of the things we were thinking about was, well, you know, depending on kind of not only the expectations about how much power the president should have, but also the sort of state of constitutional doctrine around presidential authority over the executive branch, you could have a situation where Congress was more or less reliant on self restraint on the part of the president. So one of the other things we look at in that developmental account is thinking about how to the extent that the judiciary is embracing more formalistic conceptions of the separation of powers. To the extent they're embracing the unitary executive theory in particular, that directly affects sort of Congress's ability to make choices about whether they want to be more or less reliant on self restraint or what kinds of tools they can use to sort of moderate those expectations. So, you know, I think that we end the element in a, in a kind of, you know, pessimistic place in the sense that if you care about the ability of Congress to potentially insulate certain kinds of officials from direct political or presidential pressure, if you think that some officials maybe need kind of protections from just being fired for any particular reason, for example, then to the extent that the courts embrace the notion that there cannot be any restrictions on the President's ability to fire by definition, that actually makes Congress even more reliant on this concept of self restraint. Because then the best they can do is maybe something like, well, maybe we'll give the official a term of years, try to suggest qualifications, etc. But fundamentally the President can, can do what they will with these officials, at least in terms of dismissing them. And so, you know, the, the way that we put it is right now, Congress has arguably in the last couple of years been made more reliant on self restraint at a time when we think that particular norm is more questionable regardless who's president.
- [18:06]
C
Exactly. And so I did want to ask you, though, to lay out the. In this context, because I'm sort of asking for definitions of things like self restraint and unitary executive power and presidentialism, the foundational tripartite structure that you build your case studies on upon. So if you can lay out that sort of thesis essentially for the element itself, and then we'll dive into some of the examples that you provide throughout the book.
- [18:40]
B
Yeah, so the tripartite structure there. So I talked a little bit about one of them, that being presidentialism, that over the period of our study, we're talking about a half century in American politics here, the post Watergate era, up through the present, there's been an increasing reliance in, on presidential power at the societal level as well as at the legislative level. Congress is less willing to stand up for its own institutional prerogatives, is willing to cede power to the executive. The second is this point about polarization that we are increasingly in a system, as Levinson and Pildis have described it, where we have a separation of parties rather than a separation of powers. So the extent to which a President's party would operate as A check on their interests is increasingly on what the president's doing is increasingly mitigated. So there could be maneuvers that Congress could consider, say, all right, here's a ways that we as an institution should try to lay claim to more power. The Protecting our Democracy act that we talk about at the outset of the element is a key example of that is something where insofar as that is seen as holding a president of a particular party accountable, the president's party is generally speaking, not going to be willing to go for it. And the third what John was getting at there is this point about constitutional formalism that as the question court, as the courts, especially the Supreme Court, have adopted an increasingly formalistic understanding of the separation of powers, have a much more rigid understanding of what, how institutional arrangements the Constitution allows for, that's going to clamp down on a lot of alternative arrangements that could help, that could promote independence within the executive branch, absent the kinds of devices that we are going to be that we talk about.
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C
And so you have this the foundation. And so the discussion then becomes, with all of this going on and looking at the last 50 years, particularly of legislation that Congress has passed to try to insulate people who are in the executive branch to be able to do their job without perhaps being interfered with or fired, that you have quite a few case studies. And I don't know that we need to go through all the case studies. And John, you've already mentioned the FBI and certainly this is one that we've all heard about, first with James Comey in the first Trump administration, and then with regard to Christopher Wray before the second Trump administration came into power. But you have quite a few others that people are probably less familiar with that kind of demonstrate what Congress was trying to do. And then to some degree, where we have ended up over time.
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A
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D
Yeah, so the way that we organize the element and sort of selected cases to talk about, actually maybe even before I go into some of the specific cases, one of the key early choices we decided to make with this project was we focused on appointments as kind of our main area of subject. And that's not because we don't think there are laws that we think would rely on a concept of self restraint in sort of policy making in terms of maybe something like emergency powers, for example, but for the purpose of sort of having a tractable project and a way to look at this, this consistently across subject matter, we decided to focus on appointments especially because it's also a very, you know, salient issue given developments with things like the unitary executive theory. So given that we then were thinking about, you know, what kinds of tools and devices Congress uses to actually try, try to set that expectation of self restraint and not only state it as they often did in legislative debates, but also sort of indicated in the design of the statute. So we focused on things like fixed terms, like we mentioned with the FBI Director, the 10 year term qualifications, sort of putting, you know, particular expectations of what kind of experience an official is supposed to have before they're appointed to that position, removal reporting requirements. So in that case, that's not necessarily saying you can't fire an official, but saying, you know, you have to state your reasons, maybe provide advance notice. We also talked about caps. And the best way I can describe that is to just give two examples. So that might be like, for example, with the Senior Executive Service, which is one of our cases that comes up in the Civil Service Reform act, what percentage of those officials can be political appointees, there's a cap on it. Or for the Federal Vacancies Reform act, how much time is an interim appointee supposed to be able to serve? There's a time limit on that. And then one of the other things we also do is we have some contrast cases where Congress actually did use a four cause removal protection where they tried not to rely on self Restraint. And that was interesting one just to see what was coming up in those debates. But the second reason is because it helped us sort of, I think show some of the developmental trends. And I can talk more about that in a moment. But just to give some of the specific cases then. So we mentioned the FBI director for another example of a fixed term. We talked about the Office of Personnel Management Directors fixed term in office for qualifications. One of the cases we were thinking about there was the particular kinds of roles and experience that somebody appointed to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was supposed to have for removal reporting requirements. We talked about inspectors general and the way that Congress was trying to discourage firings of inspectors general by requiring the President to give very specific reasons why they would have done that and in the case of some reforms they made actually provide advance notice in before they would fire an official. For caps I've already mentioned sort of examples of the senior Executive Service or vacancies. And then for those contrast cases, one of the ones we talked about was the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau who was in the statute originally appointed to a five year term but also given a four cause removal protection. And the reason why that's so significant to our story is that's one of the cases where the Supreme Court invalidated that four cause removal protection. And so they took a statute that was not reliant on self restraint in the same way because it had that kind of protection. And through their action of declaring that constitutionally invalid made that official more dependent on the President's goodwill to stay in office. And they sort of took away the structural independence that Congress had intended for that agency.
- [26:41]
B
Maybe what I'll offer just what John says, one case that I like talking about that is maybe a little bit less publicly salient than something like the FBI director or even the chair of the Joint Chiefs is the Senior Executive service. One of our examples of caps where the cap that's at the institutional device that's meant to further that's reflected on of Congress's expectation of self restraint is saying that only 10% of appointments into the senior executive Service can be political appointees. But that is couched in rhetoric that says 10% is the cap of political appointees. But that's not meant to be the goal. You're welcome to bring in folks if you think that's going to help you manage the administrative state more effectively. You want to have more political appointees in there. But 10% is the upper limit of what you're going to be allowed to do in expectation that'll be lower. It's your presidents aren't going to fully max out on that as a resource. And this is part of where one thing we stress about the book is that while the current administration is highly relevant to our argument, there are things that come up in other administrations that testify to the potential weaknesses of congressional expectations of presidential self restraint as an institutional remedy. Every administration, in the wake of the advancement of the of the senior executive service, will very much want to get to just about that 10% cap on political appointees. There is a recurring interest across presidential administrations in wanting to achieve greater political direction over the administrative state in a way that was seemingly out of line with what Congress was endeavoring to do with the legislation in the 70s.
- [28:21]
C
And, and I wanted to ask you about the specific example of the firings of the inspectors general. Inspectors general. Correct. And because this one has come up recently with regard to the Trump administration dismissal of any number of inspectors general. But you cite throughout the example that this is something that has been going on for quite some time. So it's not necessarily completely new to the Trump administration, but that Congress had weighed in a little bit more in the past. Can you talk a little bit about this particular example or this particular case study to sort of get at the ins and outs of the reliance that Congress would like to put on presidential self restraint?
- [29:18]
D
Yes. So it's a really interesting example, as you point out, for a few reasons. So one of them is, you know, as much as some of the recent actions by President Trump have certainly escalated things like firing IGs, it's not unprecedented. And it's also a case where past examples of presidents trying to push the envelope on this have either met pushback themselves directly or has resulted in Congress trying to make adjustments a couple of times in the past. So one of the early famous examples of this was Ronald Reagan, on taking office, dismissed a whole bunch of IGs. But on the flip side, he did face, you know, a bit of an outcry about that and, and reappointed at least some of them to their positions. So that was kind of of, you know, it's a little bit of a mixed outcome, but in a sense, like you could see, well, the outcry Congress pushing back actually did lead to some kind of degree of, of reinforcement of the norm, if you will. You know, Congress's concerns about some of the ways that the George W. Bush administration had treated IGs, or also appointed certain kinds of individuals that they didn't feel were fully qualified as IGs led to the 2008 legislation that reformed this process and set up sort of the original version of an advance notice requirement. Congress again in 2022 made some adjustments to the legislation based on the experience of the first Trump term. So there have been efforts where Congress actually really stepped in and tried to reinforce this norm through changes in legislation, through just sort of oversight and pushback. Senator Chuck Grassley has been one of the key officials across most of the decades that we about talked talk about involved with this. But, but maybe what's, you know, worth pointing out on the flip side is you also see the limits of this with the second Trump administration, the firing of just a ton of IGs across the board and just the total disregard for the advance notice requirement. They don't seem to think that that's meaningful, that they need to follow it. I don't think they think they could be pushed on that in the courts particularly. And so it still shows the extent to which some extent of presidential respect for statutory goals is, is necessary for them to actually work in practice. And that was an escalation even by Trump himself compared to some of the actions he took in his first term. One of the IG dismissals he took in his first term, as I remember it, when he was sort of asked about, well, what's the. What reason are you providing for advance notice? And he was basically like, you know, I just didn't want them there or something. And that was kind of like, ok, okay, that's advance notice. But in the second term, they just ignored it and just did it.
- [32:07]
C
And Congress in its capacity, as you also point out, in terms of the question of polarization, hasn't sort of stepped up in the second Trump administration. And again, we're only nine, 10 months into it, and this is past when the book was published, but Congress hasn't necessarily stepped up and sort of said to the president, look, you can't do that.
- [32:33]
B
Yeah, this is. There's. I, virtually virtually every expectation that we talk about experienced some significant challenge during the first Trump administration. And those challenges have only escalated going into going to the second Trump administration. The FBI director is probably an especially useful example there. It was what, of course, Trump fired Director Comey during his first term, but did come up with a set of premises for him. This is, you know, initially had linked it to the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails, wanted to, it seemed to have an appreciation for the fact that this was President defying, that this was norm defying, was going to stop him from doing that. But There was still, as John was getting at and Talking about the IGs, there's still this impulse to wanting to provide a basis. Whereas Trump from the outset going into his second term says, I am going to fire Chris Wray and I'm going to replace him with Cash Patel. And without going into whether or not Cash Patel's appointment was necessarily in line with the expectations for the role of FBI director relative to the case that we talk about. This sense that this was the understanding that Trump is advancing here is essentially that the FBI director serves at the pleasure of the President. This idea that a 10 year term is supposed to provide some nominal independence for the person in the role, that was an idea that was in effect wholly discarded as Trump was going into his, his, his second administration.
- [33:56]
D
Just to add on something that Jack said too, about sort of the, the range of cases, I mean, one of the things that was most striking to us first when we were doing drafts of this paper, you know, prior to 2025, covering the first term, was, you know, pretty much every one of our cases, there was some kind of way in which the President was trying to push the boundary or just blew past the expectation of self restraint entirely. And then the sort of almost surreal thing as we were doing copy editing and page proofs in particular in early 2025 was, you know, by the day, as we were talking to each other, sending news stories that we thought might be relevant to include in those last tweaks that we had the ability to do to the manuscript, it was like, oh, okay, well, we have an example of this case study now. Oh, okay, we have an example of this case study. And by the time, by the time, you know, we, we had to make our final submission to Cambridge, it felt like, oh, we pretty much have an example of almost all of our cases here already in like month one. And it was really striking how quickly the president, I mean, the example that Jack just gave, even before he took office, you know, he had the effect of Ray announcing the resignation. But you know, all the other things, the firing of the Joint Chief's chairman, the involvement of the acting officer, Office of Personnel Management Director in trying to set up, you know, the executive order to, to reclassify civil servants, potentially make them easier to fire, the mass firing of IGs, I mean, all of these things were happening across the board very, very quickly.
- [35:32]
B
Yeah, that was a clear contrast between 1.0 and 2.0 in a couple of regards. I think the Chair of the Joint Chiefs is, is an especially key example there that not only that you had a removal of the chair, but that you had someone appointed in Lieutenant General Kane, Dan Kane, who did not actually fit the statutory expectations for the requisite experience to be in the role. And we do think there was, there was the independence that Congress wanted out of the chair. The Joint Chiefs was something that was violated during the first administration. There were instances where Trump seemed to want to politicize Mark Milley's role. But there's a clear contrast between what that looks like as a violation of the expectation in the first administration versus what that violation looks like in the second.
- [36:16]
C
And so in this regard, we have talked a lot about, by just reference, norm violation. And so part of what you're talking about is the idea of presidential self restraint that Congress is aware of when it crafts sort of legislation around appointments. And that is potentially part of our constitutional structure of separation of powers, that Congress says you have to sort of follow these rules and the way that you appoint people to particular jobs, but that a lot of that is still based not on a way to say hold a president accountable, but on norm expectations. Is that correct?
- [37:09]
B
I, I think it's one of the, I think, I don't know, a fundamental claim of our argument, or one thing that we want to make clear is not our argument, maybe is a better way of putting it, is that this isn't a testament to the strength of Congress as an institution. Far from it. We don't intend our account as a palliative whatsoever like, oh, it's, you know, it's fine that, you know, the president has the power that he possesses. It's fine that, you know, separation powers looks the way that it does because, oh, it's all okay because these norms are going to hold the system, will hold the system up. We thought that that was, you could look to instances from the Clinton years, from the George W. Bush years, certainly in the first Trump administration. And see, here's why there's a lot of peril in this reliance. And any, you know, remotely lingering faith that would be in there that like, oh, well, you know, the president will be self restrained, President will fall in line for our expectations for what he's going to do in relation to these powers is something that I think we're now at a point as we get at in our conclusion where we say that's just like not something that Congress can in any way bank on moving forward. And that's something that I think we both agree is going to exist beyond the Trump years, that there is going to be increasing demands for what presidents are going to do with their power, they're going to be expected to maximize it in service of their own political interests, their partisan interests. So the notion that like, oh, well, you know, well, Congress said, you know, we're really not supposed to be using power to do this thing or like, oh, well, it's potentially going to violate a norm for us to do this that will have increasingly less purchase as presidents and their teams are thinking through issues moving forward.
- [38:47]
D
And just to, just to add to that, you know, I think there's again, sort of at least two big things that we're thinking about with the sort of developmental story here from the 1970s through now. So one of those is about, well, obviously, as you know, norms are not self reinforcing. And so there are cases in the past where there have been ways where Congress, through oversight, maybe through legislative adjustments, informal political pressure, public outcry, all those kinds of things, they can try to push back, they can try to sort of reinforce, set these expectations. And I should note that, you know, to the extent that we provide a lot of examples of violations of these, of these expectations, including before the Trump years, but to the extent that presidents, you know, did not try to always push the limits of their power, that's an indication of sort of, you know, the, the expectations, the norms potentially working. So for example, prior to President Trump, I think maybe one FBI director had been fired and if I remember, and if I remember correctly, there was a particular sort of scandal background to that case. So you could say that while presidents largely had respected that system for several decades, in a way it kind of worked. And then maybe the weaknesses were shown later. And that's true of some of our other cases. But I think what you see is once you have a period of, you know, polarization of the respective co partisans in Congress looking to their co partisan president to exercise power more aggressively when the interest of party kind of trumps the interest of Congress as an institution, well, then you've taken away one of the key things that you need for these kinds of norms to be reinforced, which is legislators who have a sense that they need to protect the institutional prerogatives of their branch. You know, that's the way that, as Madison put it, ambition is supposed to counteract ambition. You need people to actually be connected to the interests of the place that they serve curve. And you know, in an era of polarization and, and party teamsmanship, as Francis Lee would put it, that has been, you know, undermined to a degree. So that's one part and then the second thing again is too, at the same time, you know, in, in past, you know, periods, Congress has both itself felt, members have felt, and also the courts have been more accepting of a sort of variety of tools that could potentially reduce that reliance on self restraint. But now we're in a period, especially in the wake of a case like Trump v. United States, where, you know, Congress's tools to potentially reduce the reliance on self restraint, at least in the realm of appointments, probably in some other areas too have really been eviscerated. And so those two things in combination are really striking. The fact that the, the interest of members of Congress to protect, protect their institution, to try to reinforce norms or think creatively about other ways to, you know, protect their prerogatives, the independence of the bureaucracy, things like that, that's gone down. And then at the same time you have basically the unitary executive theory being adopted as doctrine in the judiciary.
- [42:04]
C
And so we're kind of left with a constitutional system that's not really functioning the way that I think Madison and Hamilton originally kind of thought it would.
- [42:17]
B
Yeah, it's so you. John brought up Fed 51 and it's that, that's the. And I think he laid that out perfectly where even if we had a, some renaissance of assertion of institutional prerogative in the legislature, if you had a ton of folks who came together and said we want a recalibration of, of the legislature's place in the separation of power system akin to what would have happened following Watergate, even in that world, even in which you have the interest in doing that, by virtue of the ascent of unitary thinking, the arrangements that the legislature would likely advance would be highly likely to not pass constitutional muster. So in order to achieve any reset on this, it would, it would be a multi branch effort. And that is, I think, exactly as John said, is something that does not appear in the offing.
- [43:14]
C
So given that sort of uplifting conclusion to our understanding of what's happening with our constitutional system, as scholars of that system and teachers of that system, believe me, teaching American politics these days is a challenging class. What are the two of you working on these days?
- [43:36]
B
So I am. So John was very generous in saying, oh, you know, part of what delayed us getting this project done was the birth of his son. And Jacob was a splendid addition, I thought, to our writing process. Help. That I was dealing with that entirely over zoom. But all the while I was completing my. Or I was writing and ultimately completing my dissertation, which I'm now converting into a book manuscript script that concerns president's domestic policy leadership, looking specifically at their top domestic policy priorities at the outset of their tenures. That is a similar temporal scope to what this project does. I start with Richard Nixon, I end with the presidency of Joe Biden and talk a little bit as well about Trump's second term. And in the project, I advance a new theory of president's domestic policy leadership. I talk about presidential policy leadership as being a self assertive practice. Presidents are going out and looking to advance top priorities that are going to be reflective of their own political interests, their own political projects, rather than those being externally determined. And in thinking about kind of faults in the broader constitutional system, here they. One of the key takeaways for me in thinking about presidential democracy writ large is that inasmuch as this expectation of presidential leadership as a democratic force, a benign force, has been an animating force behind increases in presidential power over the last half century. And a justification, a normative justification thereof, in as much as I'm showing, well, you know, it's not the case. The presidents are going out and looking to champion the popular will, they're looking to pick priorities that are going to advance their own standing and secure their own legacy, then that is a, an assumption of presidential democracy that needs to be seriously rethought moving forward.
- [45:24]
C
All right, so when that one's a book, I'm hoping that you will come speak with me about it on the New Books Network. John, what are you up to?
- [45:32]
D
Yeah, also, also working on a book project, by the way, let me just say about Jack's project, Besides the incredible subject matter and, and, and you know, argument that he makes, it's really an incredible example of using a combination of archival evidence and elite interviews. And I, I just want to, to tell everybody that you should be really excited to get to read that soon.
- [45:56]
B
Fabulous hype, man.
- [46:00]
D
So my own project that I'm working on, I remain very interested in sort of developments in the last 50 years or so and the President's relationship with the bureaucracy. But the way that I'm approaching that now is I'm looking at the President's relationship to the civil rights bureaucracy. So different institutions that were created in the 1950s, 60s and early 70s to help implement the statutes of the rights revolution. And my argument in that project is that, you know, presidents coming into conflict with, or even just seeking to achieve particularly policy goals in the very important area of civil rights policy is actually one of the spurs to them trying to exercise more direct control over the bureaucracy. And ultimately for Republican administrations, in particular, one of the spurs to early articulations of the unitary executive theory. So just as one quick example, like in the Reagan administration, I look at how conflicts between the Reagan White House and DOJ and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over affirmative action cases actually lead to an Office of Legal Counsel opinion that has one of the sort of most complete early articulations of, of the unitary executive theory, claiming, you know, what it means for the president to supposedly possess the entire executive power under Article 2, things like that. So. So still very much in the writing phase of that project, but kind of covers a lot of similar themes and interests as the project that Jack and I just completed.
- [47:42]
B
And if I may say, I've had the I've had the pleasure of getting to read a couple of chapters of John's book, and it is going to be simply fantastic.
- [47:49]
C
I look forward to speaking with both of you separately on your book projects and maybe the next one that you do together as well. So I wanted to thank Jack Greenberg and John Dearborn for joining me today to talk about Congressional Expectations of Presidential Self Restraint, which is published by Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Elements American Politics series in 2025. I assume it's available at the Cambridge University Press website.
- [48:20]
B
Indeed.
- [48:21]
C
Indeed. Thank you both for joining me today.
- [48:23]
B
Thank you, Lily, and happy Halloween.
- [48:25]
D
Yeah, thank you so much for having us. It was a pleasure.