| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Increase in immigration in this country. | |
| I think he should talk to his leader. | ||
| Because net migration went through the roof under the last government. | ||
| Nearly one million. | ||
| Quadrupled. | ||
| And who was cheering it on? | ||
| Who was cheering on? | ||
| The leader of the opposition. | ||
| His constituents are right to be concerned about the loss of control by the last government. | ||
| We've taken control. | ||
| We will bring these numbers down. | ||
| But the record is absolutely clear and it sits right there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That completes Prime Minister's questions. | |
| to let the front bench change over. | ||
| Democracy. | ||
| It isn't just an idea. | ||
| It's a process. | ||
| A process shaped by leaders elected to the highest offices and entrusted to a select few with guarding its basic principles. | ||
| It's where debates unfold, decisions are made, and the nation's course is charted. | ||
| Democracy in real time. | ||
| This is your government at work. | ||
| This is C-SPAN, giving you your democracy unfiltered. | ||
| Joining us from New Orleans, Stephen Griffin of Tulane Law School. | ||
| He's a constitutional law professor here to talk about the president's use of executive power. | ||
| Professor Griffin, thanks for giving us your time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No problem at all. | |
| I'm happy to be here. | ||
| We've seen the president use this power for a little over a week now, almost two. | ||
| From that approach that you've seen, what would you say is his approach to the use of this executive power? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, that's a pretty big question because there are several things going on at once. | |
| In one sense, President Trump is using executive orders to establish some of the themes and programs he talked about in the campaign. | ||
| He's giving directives to executive agencies to sort of line them up along his policy objectives and perhaps spark some action. | ||
| But there are other executive actions that raise serious constitutional questions and or are attempts to follow up on a lead, and this is a theme I'd like to introduce, a lead given to him by the Supreme Court. | ||
| So in some sense, the Supreme Court has itself teed up the power he's now exercising through executive orders. | ||
| So there are several categories there, and of course, some are more controversial than others. | ||
| That lead you talk about, is that connected to the Supreme Court case or the Trump case taking a look at executive power Trump v. United States? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Actually, so I've had this, sorry, I'm just doing the bottom. | |
| I've had this question from reporters, but I'm actually not talking about the executive immunity decisions. | ||
| I would really like to highlight the cases that are in every case book that are called removal power cases. | ||
| And people have noticed that the president is doing some arguably unusual things as far as removals. | ||
| But I don't think they've quite grasped that there's a direct connection between what the Roberts Court has been doing since Roberts got in there in 05 and what President Trump is now following up on or also pushing the envelope. | ||
| And those are removal cases like the Free Enterprise Fund case or especially the Sella Law case in 2020. | ||
| Can you elaborate then when it comes to removal cases? | ||
| Where has the president applied his power? | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| So I also should have said that all of these cases relate to the important concept, which we really started hearing about perhaps in the Bush II administration of the unitary executive. | ||
| For quite a while, conservative legal thinkers, Justice Scalia on the court, and other people on the court have been pushing the idea that the president really should be in sole control of the executive branch. | ||
| So when I talk about removals, you need to think power over the executive branch, president versus Congress. | ||
| And it can seem like a technical issue of who gets to fire whom, but the real issue, the underlying issue, is control and power over direct power over the executive branch. | ||
| And so those decisions had to do with extending the reach of presidential authority to fire. | ||
| For example, until the Sell-A-Law decision, you couldn't remove the head of the Consumer Finance Protection Board. | ||
| Both President Trump and President Biden availed themselves of this power to dismiss. | ||
| President Trump just did it again to try to get his own people in. | ||
| But there are broader issues, broader issues having to do with so-called independent regulatory agencies that Congress designed to be somewhat independent of presidential power, and also a huge issue, control over civil service employees. | ||
| And those are really big issues, and I'm not sure they've been discussed that much quite yet. | ||
| We'll continue on with our conversation with our guests. | ||
| And if you want to ask about the president's use of executive power, Stephen Griffin joining us for this conversation, 202-748-8001 for Republicans, 202748-8000 for Democrats, and Independents, 202748-8002 for independents. | ||
| If you want to text us, 202-748-8003. | ||
| So, Professor Griffin, you talked about the Supreme Court, a lot of cases looking at removal power, but essentially, what has the court done as far as this type of power given to the president? | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right, I would characterize it this way. | |
| There was an uneasy balance in the law and an understanding stemming from two early 20th century decisions, the Myers decision in the 1920s, having to do with the post office of all things, and the Humphreys executor decision in 1935, about 90 years ago. | ||
| The Humphreys executor decision has, in effect, been mentioned in some recent news stories, because in that decision, the Supreme Court seemed to say that the president could not exercise removal authority, could not control what we normally call independent regulatory agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, | ||
| and President Trump's specific action that I think may tee up a major lawsuit has to do with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the EEOC. | ||
| Now, this is a thin layer of people operating in charge of these agencies where it's been designed in by Congress that they should have fixed terms and can only be removed for cause. | ||
| At the same time, everyone agreed on the basis of the Myers decision that the president should have removal authority over cabinet-level agencies, and there's really been no question about that. | ||
| So there was an uneasy compromise or line drawn between, for example, cabinet-level agencies and these independent regulatory commissions. | ||
| Starting in the 1980s, people associated with the Reagan administration and Justice Scalia in particular started raising serious questions about this line and, in effect, embracing the unitary executive model announced in the Myers decision. | ||
| And they've really been responsible for a sort of a decades-long campaign to get that removal authority at will, removal authority extended to the entire executive branch. | ||
| And if that were to happen, that would indeed be big news. | ||
| And separately from that, there's the whole question of presidential authority over the civil service, which are lower-level employees, but which are protected. | ||
| And you see, it's not just about removal. | ||
| It's about influence and control. | ||
| And President Trump pretty clearly wants to control in a very direct sense the entire executive branch of government, irrespective of laws passed by Congress. | ||
| That's just the issue I'd like to highlight. | ||
| There are other important issues like birthright citizenship. | ||
| I certainly don't want to ignore those. | ||
| But it's just that this issue that I've just talked about has received less attention. | ||
| What does the, and you probably get asked this question a lot, specifically what the Constitution says about executive power and why you think it's grown so much since then. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, look, I'll start with what I learned, and it's still where many books start, which is Article II of the Constitution doesn't give a lot of detail about presidential power, and it certainly doesn't give a lot of detail about the structure of the executive branch. | |
| That's really for Congress to build out. | ||
| But that's the conflict. | ||
| What's the limit of Congress's power to specifically organize the executive branch versus, okay, you ask the source of the power? | ||
| Well, it's a famous gap in the Constitution. | ||
| The Constitution has an appointments clause, but it doesn't have a removal clause. | ||
| But the people who have been advancing the unitary executive idea believe it's nested, it's encapsulated in the very first sentence of Article II, which talks about vesting the executive power in the president. | ||
| And Justice Scalia argued in a case called Morrison versus Olson, he laid down a marker. | ||
| He was a lonely dissent, but he laid down a marker saying this means all of the executive power. | ||
| And what he meant is what Chief Justice Taft talked about in the Myers case, an unlimited power of removal, even in the face of congressional statutes to the contrary. | ||
| At least in separation of powers, land, that's a big conflict, and it has real world implications. | ||
| Republicans, 2027 for 88,000. | ||
| Democrats, 2027 for 88,000. | ||
| Independents, 2027 for 8-8002. | ||
| Ron is in Michigan. | ||
| Democrats line you're on with Stephen Griffin of Tulane Law School. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| In my opinion, what Trump is doing, he is eliminating all supervisor roles the federal government had to safeguard. | ||
| We'll just take Social Security. | ||
| And he is put Musk in charge of going through the records of Social Security to eliminate people from Social Security. | ||
| So what that's going to do is they're going to just eliminate people from Social Security. | ||
| And the normal in the past where you could call the federal government and get help, there will no longer be any help. | ||
| And so those cuts will go through with Trump's and the billionaires forcing them down our throats. | ||
| And there'll be no more recourse. | ||
| Those benefits to Social Security will start, and then they'll go on to VA cuts and Medicare cuts. | ||
| And there'll no longer be any recourse. | ||
| And the billionaires are in charge. | ||
| And the people, and he's taking control of the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies that would back up to the if there was, but they're no longer in place. | ||
| And the only thing that stands in his way now is the military. | ||
| And he's got Pete in there. | ||
| And so it's either fascism or fight. | ||
| Okay, that's Ron there. | ||
| Professor puts out a lot of scenarios, but I want to start with the FBI. | ||
| We saw the removal of some within. | ||
| Does that fall within the president's power because it's not an outside board? | ||
| Or you would know more than I, but where does the power fall on that front? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, you know, the news stories about the FBI often make it sound like an independent agency. | |
| And these confusions trip up a lot of people. | ||
| Similarly, with stories, let's say, about the Food and Drug Administration. | ||
| But these are not independent agencies. | ||
| They have elements, maybe. | ||
| The FBI is inside the Department of Justice. | ||
| And that was commented on in the hearings on Pam Bondi, for example, appointed Attorney General. | ||
| But there's another issue there when you're talking about the Department of Justice. | ||
| And I can perhaps talk a little bit about Musk, but the issue is there's been a post-Watergate understanding that the Department of Justice should operate informally, independently, somewhat at arm's length from the White House. | ||
| President Trump, pretty clearly, even from his first term, doesn't have much time for that, doesn't believe in that. | ||
| And there is a connection between that and Trump versus United States, the immunity decision. | ||
| Because if the Supreme Court in that case had been more mindful of what some of us regard as Watergate precedents, the decision wouldn't have come out that way because Nixon was clearly, it was possible. | ||
| People thought it was possible, certainly, to indict Nixon. | ||
| Now, I'm sorry that's a little telegraphic, but the point is that the conservative legal thinkers, including people on the court, obviously don't have the same respect for the post-Watergate precedents with respect to the FBI and the DOJ as do the people in the Trump administration and possibly on the Supreme Court as well. | ||
| In Kentucky, Republican line, this is George. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
| I'd like to know at what point would they say that a president has crossed the line? | ||
| What would that line be? | ||
| And what exactly could they do to actually stop him? | ||
| As a disabled veteran, I'd really like to know. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, if this is about the possible interference with payment systems, I don't think there are enough details on why Mr. Musk has asked for this permission to scrutinize what's called the Bureau of the Fiscal Service and the Department of the Treasury. | ||
| And I think we're kind of at early days as far as whether that represents even something that President Trump is interested in. | ||
| But in terms of the DOJ-FBI angle, I think there's just a desire from him for just more direct control. | ||
| And this has often been thought to be sort of a limiting case that no one would really be in favor of presidents directly controlling, say, who gets prosecuted and who doesn't. | ||
| But that may be challenged. | ||
| Now, another way for me to engage with the question is: is it really true that the Supreme Court would back up President Trump on all these removal questions? | ||
| And I'm not saying it's guaranteed at all. | ||
| I think that the judiciary is going to be a check on President Trump, just like it was in the first term. | ||
| People forget about that, that President Trump lost a lot of the cases brought in court, that the court was not a rubber stamp. | ||
| And I think that's important to say. | ||
| I was going to ask you to elaborate that the role the courts have about this idea of crossing a line that the viewer brought up. | ||
| Can you elaborate a little more of where you see the courts going, even in these first tranche of executive orders being issued? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, to the extent it's somehow teed up on control of the Department of Justice, I'm not quite sure how that would arise. | |
| But what I was trying to get across is the Supreme Court has kind of given Trump, whether it knows it or not, a green light to challenge the independence of these agencies I was talking about, as well as even possibly undermining the civil service. | ||
| And it's unclear how just how far the court would let Trump go. | ||
| And you can read the decisions that I just mentioned, like sell a law in a limiting way that they're not interested in destroying the whole structure of independent agencies. | ||
| But I think we have to face the fact that the Roberts Court gave a green light, sort of opened a door, and President Trump is walking through it. | ||
| That's not to say he's going to win all of the cases that I mentioned, but there's an interactive effect here that I think we have to pay attention to. |