Two key Supreme Court emergency rulings have set the stage for a massive expansion of presidential power and made the idea of an independent agency in government virtually obsolete.
Conservative legal scholars, who’ve embraced the unitary executive theory, are thrilled at what they see as a rebuke of the “administrative state,” even if it means a Democratic president in the future has more power too.
“Is there a risk of a blowback? Yes, because you’re increasing the overall responsiveness of government to the president, and so the next president will have more levers to deploy,” O. H. Skinner, a former Arizona solicitor general and longtime member of the Federalist Society, told NOTUS. “But it is bending the government to the right answer, which is if you build something this big, as in you build an administrative state that is this big and powerful, it resides under the president — and if you don’t like that, don’t build it so big.”