Source: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/self-help-and-the-presidency
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 10:19:28+00:00

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The President has not stayed on the sidelines while his opponents have done all they can to make his presidency fail.5 Rather, he has engaged in a series of unilateral actions across a range of spectrums in an attempt to circumvent the political roadblocks placed before him—a strategy that he coined “We Can’t Wait.”6 These actions have included, among others, an aggressive use of the recess appointment power,7 selective enforcement of certain statutory provisions such as those in the Affordable Care Act8 and the Immigration and Nationality Act,9 and the use of signing statements,10 rather than the veto, to signal that the President would not comply with what he believed to be constitutionally objectionable limitations imposed on his authority by the Congress.
Not surprisingly, many of the President’s opponents (and at times some of his defenders11) have claimed that such uses of unilateral executive branch power violate constitutional boundaries.12 The Obama Administration, in turn, has staunchly defended its actions as constitutionally permissible, and in so doing has relied on the traditional lines of legal authority pertaining to the scope of presidential power.13 This has not been an easy task. The Court’s recent decision in NLRB v. Noel Canning,14 invalidating the President’s expansive use of his recess appointment authority,15 is but one example in which an attempt to defend the President’s actions on traditional legal grounds has not proved successful.
This essay is an effort to respond to some of the concerns raised by Pozen’s remarkable thesis. Part I questions the central predicate offered by Pozen as justification for a President’s self-help powers—that congressional obstruction is equivalent to constitutional malfeasance.25 Part II raises my central policy objection: even if one accepts Pozen’s assertion that a particular Congress’s efforts to obstruct a President’s agenda can, in certain circumstances, be construed as constitutionally improper, the self-help remedy is too extensive an addition to the President’s already formidable array of constitutional authority. Part II.A explains why, although self-help may nominally be available to both the President and the Congress, the President is in the far better position to take effective advantage of the remedy. Part II.B sets forth some of the specific dangers inherent in investing the President with the self-help power. Part III then examines the self-help thesis from a different angle, addressing some of the jurisprudential concerns present in its application to interbranch conflict. Part IV concludes by briefly addressing the broader issue of whether the constitutional law of separation of powers should be altered to deal with the current political dysfunction.
One point before proceeding: Pozen, of course, recognizes that introducing the self-help justification into the law of separation of powers will create the danger of an undue expansion in presidential power.26 But he also contends that notions of self-help are already at play in interbranch relations and that bringing the law of self-help explicitly to the fore would not so much change existing interbranch behavior as it would provide legal structure for an existing dynamic.27 As such, presumably, the acknowledgment of the role of self-help in separation of powers would not necessarily create new risks of presidential aggrandizement; it would only make more explicit the hazards that already exist.
If this is indeed Pozen’s argument, however, then it both overstates the role that an inchoate regime of self-help currently plays in separation of powers and understates the effects that would accrue if the availability of the self-help remedy were formally recognized. Certainly, Pozen may be correct as a descriptive matter that, at times, a frustrated President or Congress may believe that the purported malfeasance of the other justifies an extraordinary response. But he is incorrect to the extent that he suggests this belief has become an accepted legal justification for an extraordinary exertion of power. Consider the illustrations raised by Pozen as examples where the use of self-help by the President might have been justified: President Obama’s uses of his recess appointment power and selective enforcement authority in response to Congressional intransigence. In none of those instances did President Obama assert that his actions were legal as a result of congressional obstruction.Instead, he claimed his actions were within the formal bounds of his authority.28 Even more to the point, neither the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) nor the Solicitor General (SG), as Pozen acknowledges, have ever even argued that a President’s actions can be defended on the basis of self-help or any similar doctrine29 (although both offices are not exactly known for being shy about asserting executive branch prerogative). The Self-Help thesis then is not the recognized law of the land and, if accepted, would move the law of interbranch relations onto new ground.
That new ground, moreover, is likely to prove particularly fertile for presidential power expansion.30 As the law now stands, a President is at least inhibited from taking otherwise impermissible action because of the precariousness of acting outside the formal constitutional bounds of her authority without legal justification. The recognition of a right of self-help, however, would provide the President with a direct license to proceed. And, as discussed in Part II below, this is a license that the President will be tempted to use early and often.
Whether the President should have the power of self-help to overcome unconstitutional congressional obstructionism obviously depends in part on whether congressional obstructionism is actually a constitutional wrong. Pozen’s Self-Help suggests that it is, or at least that it can be, because it arguably violates interbranch constitutional conventions.31 The assertion that congressional obstruction actually transgresses constitutional norms, however, is questionable.
Second, the conclusion that obstruction is a constitutional wrong is not supported by history. As referenced previously, congressional efforts to obstruct Presidents have been common occurrences throughout our nation’s history.41 Filibusters or similar tactics have been used by Senate minorities to oppose majority actions since the beginning of the Republic.42 Presidents Herbert Hoover,43 Franklin Roosevelt,44 and Harry Truman45 faced notably obstructionist Congresses during the middle of the last century.46 More recently, congressional Democrats did all they could to block the efforts of President George W. Bush to privatize Social Security, although that proposal was a central part of his agenda.47 Similarly Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone, before he died prematurely in a plane crash, endeavored to use every congressional procedure possible to prevent the United States from going to war in Iraq.48 The constitutional convention regarding congressional obstruction, if there is one, may actually be that doing all that one can to prevent the enactment of measures that one opposes is a central part of American politics.
Third, it is not even clear that the extreme position of acting (or refusing to act) to deliberately cause a presidency to fail is constitutionally inappropriate.49 To begin with, such extreme action is not completely unprecedented. The congressional opponents of President Martin Van Buren, for example, were dedicated to ensuring that his presidency was short-lived.50 Congressional intransigence did not begin with the election of President Obama.
The major problem with the self-help thesis, however, is less the claim that congressional obstruction should be considered a constitutional wrong than the suggestion that the President’s acting extra-legally should be deemed a constitutional right. Even if congressional obstruction can be fairly characterized as a violation of constitutional conventions in some circumstances, the dangers of granting the tool of self-help to the President to respond to those infractions outweigh any possible benefits. Part II.A demonstrates why—even though Pozen’s thesis allows any aggrieved branch to use the weapon of self-help—the primary beneficiary of the remedy is likely to be the President. Part II.B shows why placing that weapon in the hands of the executive is so perilous.
To be sure, Congress will still have access to some self-help remedies in the form of its ability to breach any constitutional conventions otherwise constraining its actions. But self-help will vest the President with both that power and with meaningful access to extra-legal large-C measures. The extra-legal self-help option, in short, adds an immensely powerful weapon to the President’s arsenal but comparatively little to the powers of the Congress. It therefore exacerbates the power differential that already exists between the two branches.
In addition, Presidents will likely be particularly aggressive in their use of the self-help power. To begin with, Presidents tend to be forceful in using their authority because of the public expectations that are placed on their performance.70 The public generally expects the President to act, and her inability to do so is often viewed as failure.71 Furthermore, Presidents, after they take office, tend to view their agenda as the nation’s agenda. They are therefore inclined to view efforts to thwart their agenda as impermissible forms of obstruction that threaten the national interest, justifying retaliation.72 Third, the availability of self-help would place pressure on an administration to use the remedy even when it otherwise might be reluctant to do so. Saying “no” to one’s constituencies becomes more difficult politically when one no longer has the excuse that an action is constitutionally impermissible.73 Finally, the pressures of legacy will also be in play. Presidents are more commonly judged by what they do than by what they forgo. Given the choice between taking legally uncertain action (of a kind that could be creatively defended as a legitimate use of self-help) or doing nothing, it is difficult to assume that Presidents will commonly pursue the latter option. The siren song enticing the President to make her historical mark is not easily ignored.
Given that the benefits of the self-help remedy will primarily accrue to the President, the question becomes whether that augmentation of presidential power is advisable. The answer, it seems to me, is a clear no.74 First, as has already been noted, the executive is the most dangerous branch, and its ability to dominate the nation’s agenda is unquestioned. Any additions to the President’s powers should therefore immediately be deemed suspect.
Third, the nebulousness surrounding whether the use of self-help is justifiable will also add to the President’s power. As some presidential scholars have noted, one of the major reasons why presidential power has already grown so exponentially is that the grant of powers to the President in Article II is so open-ended.77 This openness allows, and historically has allowed, presidential power to expand when a President asserts that circumstances call for its exercise.78 A similar dynamic is likely to occur if Pozen’s theory of self-help is recognized because the self-help remedy is also extraordinarily open-ended.79 Determining whether a convention still exists (or has ever existed) will often be a contestable issue, giving the party charged with deciding that issue considerable leeway.
Fourth, the availability of self-help empowers the presidency by allowing it to short-circuit the constraints inherent in the political process. The path of building political consensus across institutions and party lines can be hard and immensely frustrating.90 The route of claiming that one’s opponents are obstreperous is not. When the latter course provides a basis for access to extraordinary powers, it is not difficult to imagine why a President may very quickly give up on the former. Indeed, under a regime of self-help, a strategically motivated President might very well find that her best avenue to achieve a substantive goal is to provoke congressional intransigence so that she, via the remedy of self-help, can achieve a result unfettered by the political compromises that would be necessary if she were to work across party or ideological lines.
On one prevalent view, the common thread linking these cases is the disdain they show for constitutional boundaries. The President determines to pursue a legally dubious course of action; he finds executive branch lawyers who will bless his preferred approach; and he forges ahead, heedless of the limits that Congress has placed on him. The episodes, accordingly, “suggest that this president lacks a proper respect for constitutional checks and balances.” Abstracting from particulars, they reveal a deep continuity between the Obama Administration and its predecessors in the contingent, instrumental approach taken to the law when important political objectives are at stake. . . .
Many, I am sure, would agree with the retelling. Yet at least two other narratives can be imagined. What if, instead of the hyper-partisan obstructionism now taking place, Congress’s actions in thwarting the President’s legislative initiatives were based on Congress’s conclusion that President Obama had violated a constitutional convention by pushing through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) with no bipartisan support?95 Or what if, more broadly, Congress’s obstruction was aimed at remedying the breaches in constitutional conventions committed by prior administrations, in an effort to reverse some of the executive’s accretions of power and to regain some semblance of balance between the branches? On these retellings, “improper” constitutional obstruction becomes justifiable congressional self-help.
Third, these examples reveal some of the ambiguities (and potential limitlessness) of the self-help claim. Is it for use only by an administration or Congress that has itself been the victim of another branch’s alleged wrongdoing? Or does it protect the executive or the Congress more broadly so that each body can use the remedy to redress infractions against their institutions initiated by previous actors? If so, would it be legitimate for Congress to take extra-legal steps of some sort to curtail the executive’s war powers during the Obama Administration in response to the aggressive use of those powers by the George W. Bush Administration and by previous administrations? Similarly, would it be legitimate for the Obama Administration to aggressively use its recess appointment powers, claiming that its actions were justified as self-help in response to Congress’s acting improperly when some of its Democratic members used filibusters to block President Bush’s nominees? Is the self-help remedy, in short, designed to protect institutions against separation of powers transgressions, or is it more individual in the sense that it is meant to protect those particular Congresses and Presidents who can claim that they were improperly aggrieved by the other’s actions? Logically, it would seem the remedy should be available for both if its purpose is to correct for institutional wrongdoing.105 But the problem in viewing self-help in this manner is that it invites both the Congress and the President to take extra-legal actions to correct for infractions going back to the beginning of the federal government. Interbranch grievances are not difficult to find in American history.
Finally, and relatedly, these examples illustrate how the ambiguities inherent in the self-help claim can lead to endless cycles of actions and counter-actions coupled with recriminations and counter-recriminations. True, some of this back-and-forth goes on now with each side blaming the other as the cause of the interbranch crisis du jour. But whereas now any excesses by one of the branches can be condemned as illegal overreaching, the self-help thesis serves simply as an invitation for more of the same.
Without question, Self-Help offers an immensely creative legal solution to some of the gridlock that has currently enveloped the federal government. However, the merits of Pozen’s approach need to be evaluated for times when the political dynamics may be far different than they are today. Certainly, the current political climate is poisonous, and any notion that the warring factions are likely to come together any time soon seems at best naive. But it is equally unrealistic to assume that the current state of affairs is the permanent condition. It will not always be true that we will have a relatively weak President facing a highly motivated and intransigent congressional opposition. There will also likely be times when a President may be enormously powerful, and the only thing standing between her and unfettered executive power are a few “obstructionist” members of a congressional minority.106 Tailoring the separation of powers model to address the particular problems created by the current dysfunction therefore seems misfocused. It is also especially dangerous when the remedy it offers is one that would trump formal constitutional safeguards.
William P. Marshall is Kenan Professor of Law, University of North Carolina. He would like to thank Stephen Sachs, Richard Myers, and David Rubenstein for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay. He is also indebted to Claire O’Brien and Tyson Leonhardt for their research assistance, and to David Pozen for sharing his work and for graciously commenting on this critique.
Preferred Citation: William P. Marshall, Warning!: Self-Help and the Presidency, 124 Yale L.J. F. 95 (2014), http://yalelawjournal.org/forum/self-help-and-the-presidency.
David E. Pozen, Self-Help and the Separation of Powers, 124 Yale L.J. 2 (2014).
See infra notes 60-69 and accompanying text.
Pozen, supra note 16, at 7.
See id. at 75 n.329 and authorities cited therein.
See Myers v. United States, 272 U.S. 52, 293 (1926) (Brandeis, J., dissenting).
Pildes, supra note 1, at 276-81.
Pozen, supra note 16, at 31-34.
See supra notes 53-54 and accompanying text.
The Federalist No 51 (James Madison), No. 73 (Alexander Hamilton).
See, e.g.,Flaherty, supra note 23, at 1788-92, 1816-17.
Marshall, supra note 23, at 510.
As Pozen notes, for example, conventions can and do change. Pozen, supra note 16, at 23.
See notes 52-64 and accompanying text.
See supra notes 70-73 and accompanying text.
Pozen,supra note 16, at 66.
Delahunty & Yoo, supra note 64, at 784.
See supra notes 19-22 and accompanying text.
Pozen, supra note 16, at 5-6 (footnotes omitted).
See generally Richard H. Pildes, Why the Center Does Not Hold: The Causes of Hyperpolarized Democracy in America, 99 Calif. L. Rev. 273, 273-75 (2011) (describing the current dysfunctional state of American politics). But see Michael W. McConnell, Moderation and Coherence in American Democracy, 99 Calif. L. Rev. 373 (2011) (arguing that the nation’s politics are not dysfunctional). A recent Pew Research Center poll illustrates the degree of partisan antipathy that has overtaken the country. Pew Research Ctr., Political Polarization in the American Public 6 (2014) (finding that 27% of Democrats and 36% of Republicans believe that the opposing party presents a threat to the nation’s well-being).
See Robert Draper, Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives xv-xix (2012) (quoting Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy as saying, “We’ve gotta challenge [Democrats] on every single bill,” and noting that top House Republicans met the night of President Obama’s inauguration to devise a plan to “mortally wound” President Obama through “united and unyielding opposition”); see also John Harwood, With Victory, Republicans Would Face Uncertainty, N.Y. Times, Oct. 31, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/us/politics/01caucus.html [perma.cc/RLQ8-AJCL] (quoting Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell in an interview with National Journal as saying, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president”).
See Lisa Mascaro & Michael A. Memoli, Eric Cantor’s Loss Highlights GOP Divisions, Suggests More Gridlock, L.A. Times, June 11, 2014, http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-congress -fallout-20140612-story.html [http://perma.cc/5ZJS-KP7J] (suggesting Eric Cantor’s 2014 primary loss might have been the result of his perceived willingness to compromise with Democrats on immigration reform, among other issues).
See generally Jon Terbush, Confirmed: This Is the Worst Congress Ever, Week, Dec. 26, 2013, http://theweek.com/article/index/254566/confirmed-this-is-the-worst-congress-ever [http://perma.cc/TXB2-G5ND] (noting that out of the sixty-six bills passed by Congress in 2013—the lowest number in four decades—only fifty-eight became law).
See, e.g., John Frank & Caitlin Owens, Obama Focuses on Economy in NC State, Vows ‘Year of Action’ on Jobs, News & Observer, Jan. 15, 2014, http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/01/15/3534924_obama-focuses-on-economy-in-nc.html [http://perma.cc/G4VB-5382] (quoting President Obama as saying, “Where I can act, on my own without Congress, I’m going to do so”).
See, e.g., Press Release, White House, Remarks by the President on the Economy and Housing (Oct. 24, 2011), http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/10/24/remarks-president-economy-and-housing [http://perma.cc/925K-97CP] (“[W]e can’t wait for an increasingly dysfunctional Congress to do its job. Where they won’t act, I will.”); Charlie Savage, Shift on Executive Power Lets Obama Bypass Rivals, N.Y. Times, Apr. 22, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/us/politics/shift-on-executive-powers-let-obama-bypass-congress.html [perma.cc/7SWQ-VNZ2] (tracing the origins of the “We Can’t Wait” agenda to the fall of 2011 and arguing President Obama chose the label in preparation “to more aggressively use executive power to govern in the face of Congressional obstructionism”).
See Press Release, White House, President Obama Announces Recess Appointments to Key Administration Posts (Jan. 4, 2012), http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/01/04/president-obama-announces-recess-appointments-key-administration-posts [http://perma .cc/DR3E-2J89].
Mark J. Mazur, U.S. Dep’t of the Treasury, Continuing to Implement the ACA in a Careful, Thoughtful Manner, Treasury Notes Blog (July 2, 2013), http://www.treasury.gov /connect/blog/Pages/Continuing-to-Implement-the-ACA-in-a-Careful-Thoughtful-Manner.aspx [http://perma.cc/5X7W-7998].
See Press Release, Dep’t of Homeland Sec., Secretary Napolitano Announces Deferred Action Process for Young People Who Are Low Enforcement Priorities (June 15, 2012), https://www.dhs.gov/news/2012/06/15/secretary-napolitano-announces-deferred-action-process-young-people-who-are-low [http://perma.cc/G6XH-NGH3].
See, e.g., Press Release, White House, Statement by the President on H.R. 3304 (Dec. 26, 2013), http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/12/26/statement-president-hr-3304 [http://perma.cc/EK59-MEFA] (stating that the restrictions on the transfer of Guantanamo detainees in Sections 1034 and 1035 of the National Defense Authorization Act violated constitutional separation of powers principles and would only be implemented in a “manner that avoids the constitutional conflict”). The Obama Administration later chose to ignore those provisions when it failed to notify Congress in advance of the prisoner exchange involving Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl. Jess Bravin, Bowe Bergdahl Swap Took Place in Legal Gray Area, Wall St. J., June 4, 2014, http://online.wsj.com/articles/bowe-bergdahl-swap-took-place-in-legal-gray-area-1401924827 [http://perma.cc/A822-6U4E].
Elahe Izadi, Dianne Feinstein Disappointed Lawmakers Not Given 30-Day Notice on Bergdahl Swap, Nat’l J. Daily, June 3, 2014, http://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/dianne-feinstein-disappointed-lawmakers-not-given-30-day-notice-on-bergdahl-swap-20140603 [http://perma.cc/3VHR-CLEH] (quoting Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein as saying President Obama’s failure to notify lawmakers of the swap was “very disappointing,” and “the White House is pretty unilateral about what they want to do when they want to do it”).
See, e.g., Susan Davis, Boehner to Sue Obama Over Executive Authority, USA Today, June 26, 2014, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/06/25/boehner-suing-obama/11355639 [http://perma.cc/Y629-4DKK] (discussing Boehner’s intentions to sue “over the scope of the administration’s executive authority”).
E.g., Lawfulness of Recess Appointments During a Recess of the Senate Notwithstanding Periodic Pro Forma Sessions, 36 Op. O.L.C. 1, 2012 WL 168645, at *4 (Jan. 6, 2012) (arguing that President Obama’s controversial recess appointments in January 2012 to top posts at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board were lawful under “the traditional understanding that the Recess Appointment Clause is to be given a practical construction”).
Id. at 17-18. Pozen’s thesis is somewhat broader than this presentation, in that he argues that any branch of government might have the tool of self-help available when a coordinate branch acts illegitimately. This essay is primarily concerned with the implications of Self-Help for presidential power, although Part III briefly addresses some of the concerns with the remedy of self-help as it is available more generally.
Unless otherwise indicated, I use the term “extra-legal” to mean outside the bounds of both the large-C (formal legal) and small-c (constitutional conventions) restraints that Pozen identifies as constraining Congress and the President. See id. at 10 (citing Richard Primus, Unbundling Constitutionality, 80 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1079, 1082-83 (2013)).
Pozen argues that congressional wrongdoing should not give the President a carte blanche in how she elects to respond. Rather, the range of permissible options is limited by principles of proportionality. Pozen states, for example, that while the President (or Congress) could violate a large-C constraint in response to another branch’s engaging in a large-C constitutional violation, she could not do so in response to a small-c infraction and so, in the latter instance, would be limited to a small-c response. Id. at 66-67.
As Pozen explains: “In taking it upon themselves to rectify the misdeeds of others, self-helpers effectively act as judges of their own cause.” Id. at 50.
E.g., Bruce Ackerman, The Decline and Fall of the American Republic 6 (2010); Martin S. Flaherty, The Most Dangerous Branch, 105 Yale L.J. 1725, 1727 (1996); William P. Marshall, Eleven Reasons Why Presidential Power Inevitably Expands and Why It Matters, 88 B.U. L. Rev. 505, 507 (2008).
Pozen, supra note 16, at 41-42, 76. Congressional obstruction is not the only type of purported congressional wrongdoing that would justify a President’s self-help response under Pozen’s theory, but the efforts of some Republicans in Congress to obstruct President Obama’s agenda are the central examples that he uses in setting forth the predicates for his thesis. Id. at 4-5.
Id. at 84 (noting the concern that self-help might facilitate “presidential power grabs” or lead to “greater presidential adventurism”).
Id. at 84-85; see also id. at 10 (“By allowing us to interpret interbranch conflict in more law-like terms, a self-help perspective allows us to subject it to closer theoretical and institutional scrutiny.”).
See Press Release, White House, Remarks by President Barack Obama on Immigration (June 15, 2012), http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/06/15/remarks-president-immigration [http://perma.cc/C8MB-2F2W] (describing the Dreamers’ initiative as an exercise in prosecutorial discretion); Memorandum from Sec’y of Homeland Sec. Janet Napolitano on Exercising Prosecutorial Discretion (June 15, 2012), http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/s1-exercising-prosecutorial-discretion-individuals-who-came-to-us-as-children.pdf [http://perma.cc /Q3XS-LKTM] (same); see also Press Briefing by Press Sec’y Jay Carney (Jan. 5, 2012), http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/01/05/press-briefing-press-secretary-jay-carney-152012 [http://perma.cc/67JL -9UJM] (asserting that the President’s recess appointments were within his traditional authority).
Pozen, supra note 16, at 78-79. The closest the Solicitor General’s Office has ever come to asserting something like the power of self-help occurred in the oral argument in Noel Canning. See Transcript of Oral Argument at 21, NLRB v. Noel Canning, 134 S. Ct. 2550 (2014) (No. 12-1281) (Solicitor General Verrilli arguing “I think the recess power may now act as a safety valve given [congressional] intransigence”). This line of argument, however, was immediately rejected by Justice Ginsburg and not further pursued by the Solicitor General. Id.
Pozen, supra note 16, at 84 (noting the concern that self-help might facilitate “presidential power grabs” or lead to “greater presidential adventurism”).
See id. at 78 (referring to obstruction as a small-C constitutional violation). At times, however, Pozen seems to go even further, suggesting that obstruction can amount to a large-C (formal) constitutional violation in certain circumstances. Id. at 79 (indicating President Obama could claim that obstruction constitutes a large-C constitutional violation).
E.g., John J. Patrick et al., The Oxford Guide to the United States Government 240 (5th ed. 2002) (“Even in the 1st Congress, minority members delivered long speeches and used the rules to obstruct legislation they opposed.”); see also infra notes41-50 and accompanying text.
The reasons for such tactics were often petty. For example, on August 5, 1789, Senator James Gunn successfully thwarted one of President Washington’s first appointments because he wanted one of his own political allies placed in the job. Richard A. Baker, 200 Notable Days: Senate Stories, 1787 to 2002, at 12 (2006) (“[U]ntil the early 1930s, senators occasionally derailed nominations for positions wholly within their states simply by proclaiming them ‘personally obnoxious.’”).
Rush Limbaugh, I Hope Obama Fails, The Rush Limbaugh Show (Jan 16, 2009), http:// http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2009/01/16/limbaugh_i_hope_obama_fails [http://perma.cc /UQT7-TVJG] (“I got a request here from a major American print publication . . . to write 400 words on [my] hope for the Obama presidency. . . . I don’t need 400 words, I need four: I hope he fails.”) (internal quotation marks omitted).
The Framers did indeed believe that separating the executive and legislative functions would make government more “energetic and responsible,” Pozen, supra note 16, at 75, but to the extent that this can be characterized as a belief in greater efficacy, it is in the “non-technical sense of efficacy[, in which] an institution is efficient, or efficacious, in as far as it secures the goals set for it to achieve.” N.W. Barber, Prelude to the Separation of Powers, 60 Cambridge L.J. 59, 66 (2001).
See also The Federalist No. 73, at 444 (Alexander Hamilton) (Clinton Rossiter ed., 1961) (“[When] every institution [is] calculated to restrain the excess of law-making, and to keep things in the same state in which they happen to be at any given period[, it i]s much more likely to do good than harm . . . . The injury which may possibly be done by defeating a few good laws will be amply compensated by the advantage of preventing a number of bad ones.”).
NLRB v. Noel Canning, 134 S. Ct. 2550, 2577 (2014) (citing Myers, 272 U.S. at 293 (Brandeis, J., dissenting)).
See, e.g.,supra notes 25-26; see also Jack M. Balkin, The Last Days of Disco: Why the American Political System Is Dysfunctional, 94 B.U. L. Rev. 1159, 1160-61 (2014) (arguing that governmental dysfunction is the norm during “constitutional transition, [the] slow and often frustrating movement from an older constitutional regime to a new one”).
Filibuster,in Congress A to Z 223, 224(Charles McCutcheon ed., 6th ed. 2014) (“Delaying tactics were first used in the Senate in 1789 by opponents of a bill to locate the nation’s capital on the Susquehanna River.”); see also Catherine Fisk & Erwin Chemerinsky, The Filibuster, 49 Stan. L. Rev. 181, 187 (1997) (“[T]he strategic use of delay in debate is as old as the Senate itself.”).
Megan McArdle, Unprecedented Congressional Obstructionism Is Actually Quite Precedented, Atlantic Monthly (Oct. 11, 2011, 3:50 PM), http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/unprecedented-congressional-obstructionism-is-actually-quite-precedented/246513 [http://perma.cc/6SCL-7MTT] (noting congressional Democrats did not move President Hoover’s agenda because they knew inaction would benefit their party in the next election).
Id. (noting President Roosevelt faced an obstructionist Congress in his promulgation of the New Deal); see also William E. Forbath, The New Deal Constitution in Exile, 51 Duke L.J. 166 (2001).
Id. (noting President Truman’s denunciation of the Congress that blocked his agenda as a “do-nothing Congress”).
Obstruction for political gain was also a part of nineteenth-century politics. See infra note 50 and accompanying text (discussing congressional efforts to cause President Van Buren’s Administration to fail).
President Bush announced his plan to reform Social Security during his 2005 State of the Union Address. Senate Democrats, anticipating the announcement, sounded the reform’s death knell after a caucus meeting the day before. Richard W. Stevenson, Social Security to Be Focus of Much of Bush’s Address, N.Y. Times, Feb. 2, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/02/politics/02bush.html [http://perma.cc/Z4RD-YMG8] (quoting then-Minority Leader Harry Reid as telling reporters that “President Bush should forget about privatizing Social Security,” because “[i]t will not happen. The sooner he comes to that realization, the better off we are.”).
See, e.g., Paul Wellstone, Senate Floor Speech on the Iraq War (Oct. 3, 2002), in Wellstone: The Conscience of the Senate 189 (Mark R. Ireland ed., 2008).
See, e.g., McConnell, supra note 1, at 381 (“No dishonor is found in opposing measures a representative and his constituents believe will harm the country.”). For an interesting discussion on the normative value of committee-based congressional obstructionism, see Keith Krehbiel, Obstruction and Representativeness in Legislatures, Am. J. Pol. Sci. 643, 657 (“Obstruction, like most other common legislative strategies, is neither good nor bad without exception, but rather is a form of behavior whose normative consequences depend on the situation in which it occurs.”).
See Michael J. Gerhardt, The Forgotten Presidents: Their Untold Constitutional Legacy 7 (2013) (documenting the efforts of the Whig Party to derail Van Buren’s presidency); see also Ted Widmer, Martin Van Buren 88-89 (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. ed., 2005) (same).
See, e.g., Balkin, supra note 41, at 1171-77; Richard L. Hasen, Political Dysfunction and Constitutional Change, 61 Drake L. Rev. 989, 1013-20 (2013) (suggesting congressional gridlock may be temporary); cf. R. Shep Melnick, The Conventional Misdiagnosis: Why “Gridlock” Is Not Our Central Problem and Constitutional Revision Is Not the Solution, 94 B.U. L. Rev. 767, 774-75 (2014) (claiming that accusations of dysfunction are exaggerated).
See Sidney Blumenthal, The Permanent Campaign: Inside the World of Elite Political Operatives 7 (1980).
Brendan J Doherty, The Rise of the President’s Permanent Campaign 6 (2012) (arguing that Presidents increasingly act with an eye to the next election).
The “norm” of incessant partisan warfare would not be a “convention” as that latter term is used by Pozen. Convention, in Pozen’s terms, refers to an unwritten rule that regulates interbranch behavior rather than a term that merely describes what has become a common course of practice. Pozen, supra note 16, at 8. Presumably a hostile Congress would not violate a constitutional convention if it chose not to obstruct a President’s agenda—although its behavior might be seen as in variance with current political norms.
There may be a better argument that the Senate is acting wrongly when it refuses to allow up or down votes on a President’s nominees in order to frustrate her agenda. The confirmation authority arguably imposes an obligation to act. The legislative power does not.
US. Const. art I, § 1 (“All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States . . . .”).
Id art II, § 3 (“[The President] shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient . . . .”).
An argument could, of course, be made that constitutional norms have changed and that despite the formalities of Article I, the President, rather than the Congress, has become the key mover in the legislative process. Cf. William N. Eskridge, Jr. et al., Cases and Materials on Legislation 26, 63 (4th ed. 1998) (stating that the President “may be the country’s chief law-initiator” and “the dominant influence on the national legislative process”). The question of whether it is the Congress or the President that should be the primary actor in the legislative process under the Constitution is beyond the scope of this essay.
See NLRB v. Noel Canning, 134 S. Ct. 2550, 2606 (2014) (Scalia, J., concurring)(“[W]hen the President wants to assert a power and establish a precedent, he faces neither the collective-action problems nor the procedural inertia inherent in the legislative process.” ); see also Curtis A. Bradley & Trevor W. Morrison, Historical Gloss and the Separation of Powers, 126 Harv. L. Rev. 411, 443 (2012)​ (identifying the “fundamental imbalance” that arises from Presidents having the will and capacity to promote the power of their institution, while individual legislators cannot be expected to promote the power of Congress in any coherent, forceful way (quoting Terry M. Moe & William G. Howell, The Presidential Power of Unilateral Action, 15 J.L. Econ. & Org. 132, 145 (1999))).
“In any controversy between the political branches over a separation-of-powers question, staking out a position and defending it over time is far easier for the Executive Branch than for the Legislative Branch.” Noel Canning, 134 S. Ct. at 2605 (Scalia, J., concurring)(citing Bradley & Morrison, supra note 53, at 439-47); see also id. (“All Presidents have a high interest in expanding the powers of their office, since the more power the President can wield, the more effectively he can implement his political agenda; whereas individual Senators may have little interest in opposing Presidential encroachment on legislative prerogatives, especially when the encroacher is a President who is the leader of their own party.”).
The President may also use her unique access to the bully pulpit. See generally Maryann Cusimano Love, The New Bully Pulpit: Global Media and Foreign Policy, in Media Power, Media Politics 257, 258 (Mark J. Rozell & Jeremy D. Mayer eds., 2d ed. 2008) (discussing the evolution of the presidential “bully pulpit” since the term was first coined by President Teddy Roosevelt).
See Robert J. Delahunty & John C. Yoo, Dream On: The Obama Administration’s Nonenforcement Immigration Laws, the DREAM Act, and the Take Care Clause, 91 Tex. L. Rev. 781, 786 (2013) (noting that any efforts to challenge the legality of President Obama’s selective enforcement of the immigration laws are likely to be non-justiciable). But see Noel Canning, 134 S. Ct. 2550 (finding justiciability and invalidating President Obama’s effort to use his recess appointment powers to circumvent the efforts of some congressional Republicans to prevent certain nominees from receiving confirmation votes). House Speaker John Boehner has recently announced plans to sue President Obama for alleged overreaching. Davis, supra note 12. It remains to be seen whether that action will survive a motion to dismiss based on justiciability.
As Pozen explains, a large-C constitutional violation is one that transgresses formal constitutional requirements, while a small-c violation is one that infringes constitutional conventions. See Pozen, supra note 16, at 49.
Id. at 27-32 (arguing that President Obama, in resorting to unilateral executive action, is employing conditional self-help in response to congressional Republicans’ violating the convention of “cooperation and constraint”).
The Justice Department, for example, recently refused to prosecute Attorney General Eric Holder pursuant to the House’s vote in 2012 to hold him in contempt of Congress for failing to provide information over which President Obama had asserted executive privilege. Justice Department Will Not Prosecute Holder, N.Y. Times, June 30, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/us/politics/justice-department-will-not-prosecute-holder.html [http://perma.cc/QAH9-5VXX]. Actually, the scope of Congress’s powers to investigate the President is so broad that it is hard to imagine how Congress could ever exceed any large-C limitations on its investigatory authority. See generally William P. Marshall, The Limits on Congress’s Authority to Investigate the President, 2004 U. Ill. L. Rev. 781. Congress, of course, could attempt to impeach a wayward President, but that remedy is not extra-legal. U.S. Const. art I, § 2, cl. 5.
See Bradley & Morrison, supra note 61, at 442-43 (discussing public expectations that Presidents take the lead in addressing a wide range of domestic and international problems, and highlighting the added incentive these expectations give Presidents to maintain and enhance the authority they think is necessary to succeed).
Steven G. Calabresi, The Era of Big Government Is Over, 50 Stan. L. Rev. 1015, 1040 n.141 (1998) (citing Theodore Lowi’s proposition that “the expectations of the masses have grown faster than the capacity of presidential government to meet them”).
E.g., Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Obama to Party: Don’t ‘Run for the Hills’, N.Y. Times, Jan. 27, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/us/politics/28obama.html [http://perma.cc/9JYW-CBQB].
See Julie Hirschfeld Davis, Behind Closed Doors, Obama Crafts Executive Actions, N.Y. Times Aug. 18, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/19/us/politics/behind-closed-doors-obama-crafts-executive-actions [http://perma.cc/T5VC-X84N] (noting the increasingly noticeable effect outside groups have had on executive action policymaking during the Obama Administration).
Others might disagree. The purported unreasonableness of the concern with amassing too much power in the presidency is noted in Eric A. Posner & Adrian Vermeule, The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic 187 (2010) (arguing that the President is constrained by a highly educated and politically involved elite, as well as by mass opinion, and that American “tyrannophobia” is “fundamentally irrational”). But see The Federalist No. 47, at 303 (James Madison) (Clinton Rossiter ed., 1961) (“When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person or body, . . . there can be no liberty.” (quoting Charles de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748))).
Pozen’s response presumably is that a President who takes such a course of action faces the risk of political condemnation. Perhaps—if her actions constitute such an egregious power grab as to be indefensible. But in most circumstances, I would suspect that the blurriness in the contours surrounding the availability and the propriety of the self-help remedy will provide the President with more than enough room to gain legal cover for her actions (particularly because it is the President, as the self-helper, who is able to initially frame, and then take advantage of, any uncertainties in the legal questions involved). See infra notes 84-85, 88-91 and accompanying text.
“There is ample reason to worry that [self-helpers] will misconstrue the law along the way—not just, or even primarily, on account of bad faith, but on account of motivated cognition . . . .” Pozen, supra note 16, at 50. See also The Federalist No. 10, at 79-80 (James Madison) (Clinton Rossiter ed., 1961) (“No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity . . . . It is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.”).
As the Court demonstrated in Noel Canning, for example, small-c conventions can become large-C constraints. NLRB v. Noel Canning, 134 S. Ct. 2550 (2014) (suggesting that over time a historical practice could elevate into a constitutional rule).
Pozen himself seems to suggest that the President could claim that some types of congressional obstruction constitute a large-C violation meriting a large-C self-help response. Pozen, supra note 16, at 79.
Pozen suggests that factors other than proportionality, such as the availability of judicial review or the requirement that the President notify the Congress before engaging in any mechanism of self-help, might also serve to constrain the President’s use of her self-help powers. He is correct in part. The Noel Canning decision will serve to constrain a future President’s use of the recess power. But in many other circumstances, a President’s purported overreach will never reach a court because of justiciability limitations. See supra note 64 and authorities cited therein.
A notice requirement is likely to be even less constraining because, as with proportionality, the President as self-helper decides when and to what extent notice is warranted, and she could potentially adjust such requirements in a manner that meets her agenda. Cf. Eric Schmitt & Charlie Savage, Bowe Bergdahl, American Soldier, Freed by Taliban in Prisoner Trade, N.Y. Times, May 31, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/us/bowe-bergdahl-american-soldier-is-freed-by-taliban.html [http://perma.cc/5ZCM-6ARF] (reporting that the President did not inform the Congress before engaging in a prisoner swap, although he was purportedly required to do so by statute).
See Josh Chafetz, The Phenomenology of Gridlock, 88 Notre Dame L. Rev. 2065, 2075 (2013) (“[T]here is no magical, frictionless mechanism for converting public opinion into policy . . . . Not only does lawmaking require bicameralism and presentment, but it is also the case that the three actors—House, Senate, and President—have different electoral cycles and different (but cross-cutting) constituencies, making it likely that, at any given time, power will be shared by actors with markedly different agendas.”).
See NLRB v. Noel Canning, 134 S. Ct. 2550, 2559-61 (2014) (noting that, when interpreting the Recess Appointments Clause, the Court puts “significant weight upon historical practice,” and that “[l]ong settled and established practice” is an important consideration in clarifying the relationship between Congress and the President, “even when the nature or longevity of that practice is subject to dispute, and even when that practice began after the founding era”); Bradley & Morrison, supra note 61, at 412 (“Arguments based on historical practice are a mainstay of debates about the constitutional separation of powers.”).
See generally Michael J. Gerhardt, The Forgotten Presidents xiii (2013) (noting how presidential power builds upon itself).
See Curtis A Bradley & Trevor W. Morrison, Presidential Power, Historical Practice, and Legal Constraint, 113 Colum. L. Rev. 1097, 1100 (2013) (noting that the Obama Administration relied heavily on arguments from precedent to justify the initial deployment of military force in Libya and the continuation of operations beyond the sixty-day limit of the War Powers Resolution).
See Steve Benen, Shifting the Burden, Wash. Monthly (Dec. 27, 2009, 10:30 AM), http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_12/021646.php [http://perma.cc/5SLX-UEGT] (quoting commentator Greg Sargent as saying “[the ACA] is the first major reform in American history to be unanimously opposed by a major party”); Revisiting the House and Senate Votes on “Obamacare,” VoteView (June 25, 2012), http://voteview.com/blog/?p=530 [http://perma.cc/7T9R-ZR8Y](noting that the lack of bipartisan support for the Affordable Care Act stands in stark contrast to the bipartisan and cross-ideological support that was behind nearly all of the other landmark pieces of legislation passed in the last century).
See Brief for Constitutional Jurisprudence et al. as Amici Curiae in Support of Respondents at 6, 22-34, Nat’l Fed’n of Indep. Bus. v. Sebelius, 132 S. Ct. 2566 (2012) (No. 11-398), 2012 WL 484070, at *6, *22-34 (arguing that “[t]he ‘presumption of constitutionality’ that [the Supreme] Court has traditionally bestowed upon Congressional action is substantially weakened” for the ACA, because it was enacted without bipartisan support).
Cf. Colegrove v. Green, 328 U.S. 549, 556 (1946) (holding that the issue of whether a system of legislative apportionment violated the Guarantee Clause was a “political thicket” and a non-justiciable political question). But see Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962) (finding that legislative apportionment was justiciable under the Equal Protection Clause).
See Harwood, supra note 2 (quoting Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell in an interview with National Journal as saying, “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president”).
See Michael D. Shear, Republicans May Opt Out of Obama’s Health-Care Summit, Wash. Post, Feb. 9, 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/08/AR2010020804202.html [http://perma.cc/L8JU-S98K] (“Leading House Republicans raised the prospect Monday night that they may decline to participate in President Obama’s proposed health-care summit if the White House chooses not to scrap the existing reform bills and start over.”).
See Greg Hitt & Janet Adamy, House Passes Historic Health Bill, Wall St. J., Mar. 22, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748703775504575135440191025592.html [http://perma.cc/82VH-9SSE] (noting that the House voted 219 to 212 to approve the measure, with every Republican voting no).
See For the Record—Obama to U.S. Senate: Stop Blocking My Judicial Nominees, Charlotte Observer, Oct. 3, 2010, at 22A (quoting President Obama’s complaints about the slow pace of judicial confirmations, including his statement that the blocking of his nominations is “a dramatic shift from past practice that could cause a crisis in the judiciary”).
See Melanie Trottman & Brody Mullins, Tensions Flare After Recess Maneuver: Obama Bypasses Senate on 15 Stalled Appointments, Drawing Fierce GOP Criticism, Wall St. J., Mar. 29, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB20001424052702304325404575148332890329718.html [http://perma.cc/SGV8-Y27R] (discussing President Obama’s decision to use recess appointments to “circumvent the Senate” and the ensuing congressional fallout).
See Jeremy W. Peters, In Landmark Vote, Senate Limits Use of the Filibuster, N.Y. Times, Nov. 21, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/22/us/politics/reid-sets-in-motion-steps -to-limit-use-of-filibuster.html [http://perma.cc/RH9V-BN8Z] (reporting that the Senate approved “the most fundamental alteration of its rules in more than a generation” when it ended the minority party’s ability to filibuster most presidential nominees).
Pozen, supra note 16, at 44 (citing Mark Tushnet, 1937 Redux? Reflections on Constitutional Development and Political Structures, 14 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 1103, 1109 (2012); Mark Tushnet, Constitutional Hardball, 37 J. Marshall L. Rev. 523, 524 n.4 (2004)).
Pozen does not expressly discuss whether self-help would be available as a remedy against breaches of constitutional conventions by previous administrations or Congresses, but his Article invites the reader to “push the [self-help] inquiry further.” Pozen, supra note 16, at 86. This hypothetical does so.
This is often true in wartime where, in the words of Mark Tushnet, the President typically enjoys support in the form of a “rally around the flag” effect. Mark Tushnet, Controlling Executive Power in the War on Terrorism, 118 Harv. L. Rev. 2673, 2678 (2005).

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