JOHN YOO AND ROBERT DELAHUNTY: Breaking Watergate’s Hold on the Presidency.

President Trump’s flurry of executive orders represents the most aggressive phase of the campaign against the dysfunctional administrative state.  Trump does not mean solely to turn back the clock to the “halcyon,” pre-Watergate days of the Imperial Presidency.  A President who wants to shut down the Department of Education and hand its responsibilities off to the states is not seeking to concentrate more power within the Executive branch.

If Trump succeeds, the federal government’s elected branches will re-acquire lost powers. Trump aims not to eviscerate congressional power but to restore a lost sense of congressional responsibility. Unelected and unresponsive bureaucrats should not make the hard decisions in domestic policy but, again, should return to popularly elected representatives.  At the same time, the President, too, would no longer be saddled with a recalcitrant bureaucracy.  The civil service will understand that it exists to carry out the President’s and Congress’s policies, not to pursue an agenda of its own.  Trump wants the right-sizing of the Administrative state, and certainly not its expansion.  His aim, as we see it, is not to accrue power to the executive but to see that power flows through its proper channels.  That is a goal worth fighting for.

Read the whole thing.