ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
So far in his second term, President Trump has signed more than a hundred executive orders. Critics say it's part of an unprecedented attempt to expand the power of the presidency. Recent presidents have also made widespread use of executive orders. Joe Biden signed 162 during his presidency. Barack Obama signed 277. But this kind of power has not always rested with the president. The hosts of NPR's history show Throughline, Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei, have the story of the first modern president to really expand executive power.
RAMTIN ARABLOUEI, BYLINE: When the framers sat down to write the Constitution, they were divided over what the executive branch should look like. The one thing they definitely knew they didn't want was a monarchy, with a single person in charge, holding all the power.
ANDY RUDALEVIGE: And that was in part a reaction to the existence of King George III. You know, the idea of executive tyranny is very high on people's minds at that point. Half the time, they're worried about making this office too strong. The other half, they're worried about making it too weak. It's kind of like Goldilocks, right? They want to make it just right.
RUND ABDELFATAH, BYLINE: This is Andy Rudalevige. He's a professor at Bowdoin College.
RUDALEVIGE: And I've been researching and teaching about the executive branch for about 20 years now.
ARABLOUEI: For four months, they debated whether or not there should be a president and what the terms and limits of executive power should be. And by mid-September 1787, they had made their minds up. The result was Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) The president shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States...
RUDALEVIGE: He's allowed to pardon people. He's allowed, of course, to appoint people to office.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) By and with the advice and consent of the Senate.
RUDALEVIGE: He's allowed to make treaties.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) By and with the advice and consent of the Senate.
RUDALEVIGE: But all of these, pretty much, except for the pardon power, have this big asterisk, right? Because they require that Congress act. It's pretty vague. It does lay out that sort of broad notion of the executive power, but it doesn't define the executive power.
ABDELFATAH: Basically, Article 2 had left a lot of room for interpretation, whether intentionally or not, because all the president really needed in order to expand that vaguely defined power was buy-in from Congress.
ARABLOUEI: When George Washington, the first president, took office, he often deferred to the Senate in his decision making, and if they didn't agree with him, he rarely fought back. So the center of power didn't really rest with the president.
ABDELFATAH: To get to what we think of as the modern presidency, in which the executive branch holds a lot more power, we have to fast-forward through about 150 years, to the height of the Great Depression and the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
FRANKLIN D ROOSEVELT: My friends, this is a day of national consecration.
RUDALEVIGE: We really see, as he takes office in 1933, the sort of shaping of the presidential office into something that we would recognize today.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ROOSEVELT: In the working out of a great national program that seeks the primary good of the greater number, it is true that the toes of some people are being stepped on and are going to be stepped on.
ARABLOUEI: So what kind of things did FDR do to really, like, push the boundaries of the presidency?
RUDALEVIGE: Really, I think four things come together in terms of, you know, what the presidency looks like. One is this notion of unilateral authority - the ability to act using the administrative side, the executive side of government. He's the first president to have a legislative program in a comprehensive way to propose things to Congress that he thinks they should adopt across the entire government. He's the first president to have a White House staff in the way that we would recognize it today. And then he's also the first president to really have the kind of visibility, the personification of the office.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States.
RUDALEVIGE: Remember the fireside chats, the famous conversations that Roosevelt has. He's literally in your house, talking to you...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ROOSEVELT: My friends, I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking.
RUDALEVIGE: ...In a way the previous presidents just couldn't do. And so that does give him, you know, sort of this soft power, which really does give him leverage to work on Congress, to be able to pass legislation that builds up the executive branch. And then once the executive branch is bigger, then he has more power to act through executive orders or other regulations that enables him to do more without going back to Congress.
ARABLOUEI: Was anyone, like, worried about the things that Roosevelt was doing? I guess at the time, people would be like, this is a lot coming from the president.
RUDALEVIGE: Oh, yeah. You know, Roosevelt early on - right? - starts talking about, well, I need Congress to give me, you know, emergency powers to fight this Depression. And by the way, he said at one point, if you don't give them to me, I'm going to use them anyway. And so that certainly got people to sit up. Now, Congress, in fact, did give him the powers he was asking for in that case. But, you know, there was a lot of nervousness when he ran for an unprecedented third term in 1940.
ARABLOUEI: This was before the 22nd Amendment was ratified, which limits the U.S. president to two terms. So Roosevelt won that third term - the only president who ever did.
ABDELFATAH: And then the U.S. entered World War II.
RUDALEVIGE: Suddenly, again, you have a lot of authority delegated to the president not only to run the war, but to effectively run the national economy.
ABDELFATAH: The state of wartime emergency allowed Roosevelt to institute rationing, rent control, wage and price controls.
RUDALEVIGE: The crisis really does precipitate changes in, you know, the way the U.S. government is perceived by the public, what's expected of it. And Roosevelt is ready to jump into that. He becomes, again, sort of the prototype of what people will expect a president to be from then on.
ABDELFATAH: And then Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. It authorized the forced relocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans.
RUDALEVIGE: You know, ripping people from their homes and putting them in camps, I think even at the time, there were many people who thought it was tyrannical.
ARABLOUEI: The legality of FDR's Executive Order 9066 was questioned by the courts, and the case made its way all the way up to the Supreme Court.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RUDALEVIGE: The Supreme Court upheld it as, you know, basically, again, a military necessity, and they were going to defer to the president and to the military in this case. There's a famous dissent to that case, though, which gets to the broader point of presidential emergency powers. And Justice Jackson says at that time that, you know, these emergency powers are like a loaded weapon. It kind of lies around, waiting for somebody to pick it up and use it for something else. And that, I think, is something we have seen over time - that presidents will act in one way and then future presidents will look back and say, well, he did it and I should be able to do it. I can use that precedent to bolster my own case for enhanced power.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SHAPIRO: That was Andy Rudalevige speaking with Ramtin Arablouei and Rund Abdelfatah, hosts and producers of NPR's Throughline. You can hear the full episode wherever you get your podcasts.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
