LEILA FADEL, HOST:
It's Presidents Day, so we wanted to look at how the current president, President Trump, is exercising the authority of the Oval Office and how that squares with the U.S. Constitution. To do this, we've got Jeffrey Rosen on the line. He's a professor at the George Washington University Law School and president of the nonpartisan nonprofit National Constitution Center. Good morning and thanks for being on the program.
JEFFREY ROSEN: Good morning. Happy Presidents Day.
FADEL: Happy Presidents Day. OK, so over the weekend, President Trump posted this on social media. He said he who saves his country does not violate any law. What was your reaction when you read that?
ROSEN: Well, that is something that President Nixon asserted when he said if the president does it, it's not illegal. But it's not a principle of the American Constitution, which is based on the idea that the president is not a king and that he is accountable to the Constitution and the laws.
FADEL: So how far is Trump pushing the limits of his executive authority under the Constitution, which limits presidential powers with checks and balances from other branches of government?
ROSEN: Well, the definition of a constitutional crisis is very high. It's when the president openly defies an unambiguous Supreme Court ruling. And no president in American history has done that, and President Trump hasn't done that either. So in that sense, we are not yet in a constitutional crisis.
FADEL: Now, that's something the Democrats have asserted. In your view, it's not there yet. We saw, though, a slew of resignations at Trump's Justice Department, including from conservative prosecutors, in protest of the decision to drop charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams, saying it was an illegal political trade. Does the White House have the ultimate word over whether cases are prosecuted by federal prosecutors?
ROSEN: Yes, prosecution is a core power of the president under Article 2 of the Constitution. So although the order to drop a prosecution for political reasons violates long-standing Department of Justice norms, it doesn't violate the Constitution.
FADEL: Are there historical precedents for this use of executive power in this way that we're seeing from the current president?
ROSEN: That's the crucial question. And the truth is that executive power has vastly expanded. Ever since the beginning of the 20th century, Democratic and Republican presidents have tried to do by executive order what they couldn't achieve through Congress. And what we're testing now is the limits of that idea. There are a series of really important constitutional tests of executive power, including the president's ability to fire officers in independent agencies and his power to withhold funds that Congress has allocated. And those are two big categories of cases that may go up to the Supreme Court. But the truth is in both of those areas, the law is unsettled. And it's possible that the Supreme Court could overturn its previous holdings, which say that the Congress can create independent agencies and the president cannot withhold congressional funds. And in that sense, it's possible that they might approve of what President Trump is doing.
But there's no question that under current law, he's testing the limits of executive power and attempting to do - you asked for historical precedence - what probably no president since Andrew Jackson, who President Trump embraces as a model and was attacked by his critics as King Andrew, because he tried to centralize executive power in a populist way. And not since Andrew Jackson threatened not to spend funds in the bank of the United States and also threatened, although he didn't actually carry out his threat, to defy the Supreme Court have we seen such a dramatic clash between presidential and judicial power.
FADEL: Now, one of the things that the president has done is he wants to cut federal spending. And how he's doing this is he's reducing the workforce and saying he wants to eliminate certain federal agencies. What are the limits to the power the president can exercise over federal agencies?
ROSEN: Well, right now, Congress has created a series of agencies, like the Federal Trade Commission, that have quasi-independent officers. And the president can't fire them because he disagrees with them politically. They can only be fired for cause - in other words, if they do a bad job or some kind of wrongdoing. And the big question now is whether those limits on a president's power to fire are constitutional. And in fact, just yesterday, the Supreme Court received a petition to review a case where the president had fired an independent officer, and he charged that as illegal.
FADEL: Jeffrey Rosen is president of the National Constitution Center. Thank you for your time.
ROSEN: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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