The “imperial presidency” is the term the sources use for a presidency exercising power beyond what the Founders intended and beyond the express language of the Constitution. On The Bob Zadek Show the concept appears less as a standalone doctrine than as the domestic face of war and the growth of the administrative state. Guests across four episodes — Ivan Eland, Gene Healy, Caroline Fredrickson and Ilan Wurman — approach it from different directions, but each treats the expansion of executive power as a structural fact with constitutional consequences.
War and the erosion of liberty
Ivan Eland, described by Bob Zadek as director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute, frames the center’s work as studying the nexus between war and the erosion of liberty. He lists the hidden domestic costs of war that people do not often attribute to war, including erosion of civil liberties and increasing executive power past what the Founders had ever intended. In his account, the result is that the United States now has an imperial presidency because of the wars of the 20th century and partly into the 21st century. He names the brushfire wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya as conflicts that did not turn out as wanted, and notes that after Vietnam people are more against war than they are normally. United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014)
Eland also sets a limit on the peace position: he affirms that people have a right to self-defense personally and that nations have a right of self-defense, and that when under attack you have to answer that. He cites World War II as a case in which the United States was attacked and answered, and says most people would support it. The center’s purpose, in his telling, is to bring home for people of all political persuasions the costs of war. United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014)
Impeachment and the singular office
Gene Healy, identified by Zadek as a Vice President at the Cato Institute and author of Impeachment: The Indispensable Remedy, addresses the question Zadek poses about whether the Founders’ view of impeachment is still relevant given how much more powerful the presidency has become. Healy says it is tough to put yourself inside the mentality of the Founders, but that as limited as the office was, they were still particularly concerned about impeachment as a remedy for a presidency that goes wrong. He notes that the bulk of the discussion at the Constitutional Convention about impeachment concerned the presidency, and that the longest debate in 1787 on the impeachment power, on July 20th, was entirely with reference to the impeachment of the president. Which Impeachment Movie Are You Watching? (2019)
Healy attributes to Madison the argument that impeachment is indispensable because the presidency is the one office headed up by one man. Where a judge or a congressman or two who go wrong are drowned out — Healy uses the phrase the multiplicity of members — the presidency is run by a singular individual, and Madison said incapacity or negligence or perfidy in that office could be fatal to the republic. Healy’s own conclusion is that if the office is uniquely dangerous because it is headed up by one person, that becomes even more compelling when the office gains vast new powers over more than a century. He adds that he has seen law professors argue that too much depends on the office of the presidency to remove a president, and that this cuts the other way: we can survive a crooked federal judge or cabinet secretary, but one official with nuclear weapons and control of the federal law enforcement apparatus who is unfit is a continuing danger. Which Impeachment Movie Are You Watching? (2019)
In the same conversation, Zadek draws a distinction between a parliamentary system and the American one: the Prime Minister is not directly elected by the people, whereas the president is, so impeachment is one branch of government undoing the will of the people. Which Impeachment Movie Are You Watching? (2019)
Convergence on limiting executive power
Caroline Fredrickson, discussing a progressive constitutional drafting project, tells Zadek that of all the places where the three teams most converged, it was around limitations on executive power. The conservative team, the libertarian team and the progressive team, she says, came separately to the realization that more limits on presidential power were needed. Caroline Fredrickson on the Progressive Constitution (2021)
Fredrickson describes specific changes the teams favored. All three teams looked at making it clear that impeachment of the president can occur without needing a criminal act, because there had been obfuscation of this point in debate around the two impeachments of Donald Trump; the teams thought it was the law beforehand but wanted abuse of the public trust, which she calls the original conception of impeachment, made clear and explicit in the Constitution. The teams also strengthened Congress’s oversight powers. The progressive and conservative teams agreed on replacing the Electoral College with a national popular vote and on supporting a legislative veto. They wanted a two-thirds vote for an Attorney General so that the office would not necessarily be so partisan. On the Supreme Court, the three teams all agreed on term limits; the libertarian team supported it but did not put it in their Constitution, while the conservatives and progressives put 18-year term limits for Supreme Court justices in theirs. Caroline Fredrickson on the Progressive Constitution (2021)
Zadek’s framing of the question to Fredrickson is that the president has been able to exercise far more power than the founders envisioned and than the express language of the Constitution even as amended, which many people attribute to an abdication by Congress delegating too much power to the administrative state. Caroline Fredrickson on the Progressive Constitution (2021)
The Anti-Federalists and the royal prerogative
Ilan Wurman, described as an executive power scholar, tells Zadek that the Anti-Federalists feared the executive and were prescient about the risks of an imperial presidency. His argument turns on the origins of the enumeration of powers in Article I, Section 8. In his account, the founders took a list of the royal prerogative powers exercised by the king — the list in Blackstone — and assigned most of them to Congress. Most audiences, he says, think the enumeration was intended to limit Congress’s power, which it does, but the powers were probably enumerated because that was the only way to assign the historically royal prerogative powers over war and peace, over commerce, over immigration, and raising and regulating troops to Congress. Congress, he concludes, was supposed to have a lot more say in foreign affairs than the modern imperial presidency has. The Conservative Constitution (2021)
Wurman adds a procedural account of how the enumeration came about. The Constitutional Convention, he says, rejected a resolution to enumerate power — Resolution 6 — in favor of a resolution to give Congress all legislative powers over matters over which the separate states were independent or incompetent. The Committee of Detail then went ahead and enumerated the power anyway, ignoring the convention’s instructions. He credits William Crosskey, whom he places at Chicago in the 1930s, with first coming up with the observation that over half the powers in Article I, Section 8 are directly taken from Blackstone’s chapter on the royal prerogatives. Wurman calls it a myth about how we have an enumeration of power, while granting that the enumeration does in fact and in effect limit the national government’s power and that this is a good thing. The Conservative Constitution (2021)
Wurman also says the Anti-Federalists thought the judiciary would slowly accrete power to itself through precedents and judicial review, and that Hamilton responded that the judiciary has only the power of judgment, not will or force, and lacks the power of the purse or the sword. In Wurman’s view the Anti-Federalists were in some respects prescient, and the Supreme Court has an outsized role in modern American politics. He describes his project’s objective as taking the framers’ principles — self-government, liberty, separation of powers, federalism — and providing a corrective, saying the Anti-Federalists turned out to be right and that it took 150 years, then 200 years, for them to start becoming right, mostly because of failings as a people and letting politics and political ends trump constitutional principle. The Conservative Constitution (2021)
Across episodes
The topic recurs across four episodes spanning 2014 to 2021, and the treatment shifts in emphasis rather than in conclusion. Eland in 2014 locates the imperial presidency in the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries and the domestic costs of war. Healy, in 2014 and again in 2019, turns the same premise toward impeachment, arguing that the presidency’s singular character makes the remedy more compelling as its powers grow. Fredrickson in 2021 supplies the drafting-project evidence that conservative, libertarian and progressive teams independently converged on limiting presidential power. Wurman in 2021 supplies the historical argument that the Anti-Federalists were prescient about the risk. What changes between the earlier and later treatments is the frame: from war as cause to impeachment as remedy to constitutional drafting as response to founding-era history as explanation. What does not change is the shared premise that the presidency has exceeded its intended limits.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the outcome of any impeachment proceeding, the text or holding of any case, or the name of any statute enacted to constrain the executive. They do not give the date or full contents of the constitutional drafts discussed by Fredrickson and Wurman, nor the identity of the other participants in those drafting teams. Several excerpts break off mid-sentence or at a section heading, and nothing is drawn from the missing portions.