Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Harvard Law Review Forum

Abstract

We are grateful to the Harvard Law Review Forum for the chance to respond in these pages to The Executive Power of Removal. In this new piece, Professors Aditya Bamzai and Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash aim to persuade readers that the President’s power to remove executive officers is exclusive and nondefeasible; textually mandated; and a matter of common assent at the time of the Founding. There are high hurdles to proving this argument, and this piece fails to scale them. There is little evidence for any of these separate contentions, whether we look to the Constitution’s text or the history of the Founding. We are not convinced that the Article says much that is new, either. For nearly fifty years, defenders of the “unitary executive” have relied on the same historical set pieces and sources to make the same arguments. Professors Bamzai and Prakash propose to reinvigorate this old debate by offering “new materials” and a rejoinder to recent critics. Yet it was unclear to us which materials were new or what the new materials added. And while a response to critics would be valuable, Bamzai and Prakash all but ignore the most compelling recent work critiquing unitary theory and a nondefeasible presidential removal power.

First Page

404

Volume

136

Publication Date

2023

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