The Roots of Trump's Presidential Power Push

The drive for a more powerful chief executive took shape in the first Bush White House

In September of 1989, in the first year of the presidency of George H.W. Bush, I wrote two front-page articles for The Wall Street Journal, which ran on consecutive days bearing a label that read simply: “Presidential Power.”

To understand the significance of that, you have to know that, in those days, the Journal almost never did series of stories on its front page. Normally, the reporter’s job was to figure out how to tell a story in one, comprehensive “leder,” or single story running down the left- or right-hand column of the front page. But the Journal’s editors and I thought we were onto something really significant: The president of the United States had embarked on a broad campaign to bolster the powers of the presidency.

This historical footnote matters now because it shows that the current effort by President Donald Trump to expand his presidential powers—an effort given a significant boost late last week by a Supreme Court ruling limiting the ability of federal courts to stand in his way by issuing nationwide injunctions—isn’t some recent crusade he initiated.

Rather, it is the culmination of a decades-long quest by Republicans and legal conservatives to enhance the power of the chief executive. That effort began in the Reagan administration, but really took off in the first Bush presidency. If you’re searching for the starting line, that’s where to look.

One of the biggest proponents of this effort was John Roberts, now the Chief Justice, who was involved in the push from the start. Just off in the wings were Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, soon to be elevated into positions that would lead them to seats on today’s Supreme Court.

The rationale for the push to expand presidential power was explained in that first of my two Journal stories back in 1989: “An increasing number of political activists, mainly conservative Republicans, are complaining that presidential power has been steadily eroded as Congress has become more involved in the details of domestic and foreign policies. The result, conservatives assert, is a presidency too shackled to conduct a decisive foreign policy or clean up the budget mess, and they are launching a campaign to change the balance of power.” The leading crusader then was the late C. Boyden Gray, the chief counsel in the Bush White House, who was quoted as saying that Congress’ own reach for power had reached “critical mass.”

In this view of the political world, when President Richard Nixon was deeply wounded in the 1970s by the twin disasters of the Watergate scandal and the unpopular Vietnam War, Congress stepped in to take advantage of his weakness by asserting its own prerogatives.

Congressional leaders of both parties worried that Nixon had ushered in an “imperial presidency” in which he simply took control of both budget and national-security affairs and challenged anyone to stop him. The principal tools Congress gave itself to claw back power were the Impoundment Control Act, which limited a president’s ability to refuse to spend money Congress had duly authorized, and the War Powers Act, which attempted to compel a president to seek congressional approval for military actions abroad.

The idea that those and similar congressional attempts at constraining the president had gone too far took hold in conservative legal and think-tank worlds. That effort led to, among other things, the drive to assert the “unitary executive theory,” which holds that, under the Constitution, the president, singly and solely, is the master of all executive agencies, departments and personnel. Attempts by Congress to establish independent agencies or dictate what regulators can and can’t do were, by and large, illegitimate uses of power, under this theory.

This theory started to take root in the Reagan Justice Department—and in the thick of the effort were two young lawyers there, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. “During the Reagan administration, a group of younger conservatives, which included Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, at the Office of Legal Counsel (‘OLC’) and the White House Counsel's Office, asserted a theory of the unitary executive which said that the President had to have the power to fire any executive officer,” says a 2008 article in the Pepperdine University Law Review.

The push really accelerated in the first Bush adminstration, however. “A few weeks after taking office, President Bush had a private lunch with Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, White House Chief of Staff John Sununu and presidential counsel C. Boyden Gray,” I reported. “The single topic on the agenda: guarding the president's power. By lunch's end, Mr. Bush had ordered Mr. Thornburgh to watch for any congressional intrusions on presidential authority and to sound an alert whenever he spotted one.”

The idea was controversial then, as it is now. My piece quoted Democratic Rep. David Obey saying that it was “historically absurd” to argue that the presidency had been eroded. “Anybody who says that has the institutional memory of a mouse.”

The core members of today’s Supreme Court soon were in positions to carry such impulses into action. In that first year of the first Bush term, Roberts was brought back into government from a stint in private practice when he was named deputy solicitor general. From there, he moved on to the federal courts. In 1990, Bush appointed Alito and Thomas to the federal bench, and, ultimately, Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991.

Since then, Roberts in particular has advanced the idea of robust presidential power, shielded from intrusions by either the executive or judicial branches. In one notable 2020 ruling, for example, he wrote that the Constitution “vests the entire ‘executive Power’ in the President alone.”

Given President Trump’s limited interest in citing the work of any of his predecessors, least of all one named Bush, he isn’t likely to recognize this history. But whether you like it or fear it, the process of enhancing presidential power didn’t begin with the current administration. And it may not end there; if Republicans don’t think the next Democratic president will take full advantage of the enhanced powers Trump is building up now, they are deluding themselves.