Abstract:The presidency is now thought of as a representative institution. I argue that the idea of presidential representation, the claim that presidents represent the whole nation, influenced the political development of the institutional presidency. Specifically, I show that the idea was the assumption behind creating a national budget system in the United States. While the challenge of World War I debt prompted Congress to pass the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, the law’s design owes much to reformers’ arguments that the president lacked institutional tools to fulfill his representative role. Congress institutionalized presidential representation in budgeting by including two key components: a formal license for presidential agenda setting in the budget process and an enhanced executive organizational capacity with the Bureau of the Budget. However, the law also revealed the problems raised by attempting to provide the “proper organs” for presidential representation, which push against the written constitutional frame.

As the nation’s chief executive, Donald Trump pitted himself repeatedly against the institutions and personnel of the executive branch. In the process, two once-obscure concepts came center stage in an eerie face-off. On one side was the specter of a “Deep State” conspiracy – administrators threatening to thwart the will of the people and undercut the constitutional authority of the president they elected to lead them. On the other side was a raw personalization of presidential power, one that a theory of “the unitary executive” gussied up and allowed to run roughshod over reason and the rule of law. The Deep State and the unitary executive framed every major contest of the Trump presidency. Like phantom twins, they drew each other out and wrestled to light basic issues of governance long suppressed. Though this conflict reached a fever pitch during the Trump presidency, it is not new. Stephen Skowronek, John A. Dearborn, and Desmond King trace the tensions between presidential power and the depth of the American state back through the decades and forward through the various settlements arrived at in previous eras. Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic is about the breakdown of settlements and the abiding vulnerabilities of a Constitution that gave scant attention to administrative power. Rather than simply dump on Trump, the authors provide a richly historical perspective on the conflicts that rocked his presidency, and they explain why, if left untamed, the phantom twins will continue to pull American government apart.

This chapter examines the theory of the unitary executive and its deployment in the Trump presidency afgainst the specter of a Deep State. The theory asserts that the president possesses all the executive power, that the incumbent alone is the executive branch. The idea is that anything less than complete control over administration by that individual risks an obfuscation of responsibility, clouding the judgments on presidential performance that “the people” get to deliver retrospectively in the next election. This reading of the Constitution is often joined to a strikingly plebiscitary conception of American democracy. This chapter takes up two issues of special interest. The first is an alternative “republican reading” of the Constitution which anticipates inter-branch collaboration in the control of administrative power. The second is the relationship between the vesting clause of Article II, on which the unitary theory is based, and the selection procedure, which has changed radically since its original constitutional formulation. The chapter concludes by pointing to the distortions of constitutional meaning introduced by joining an expansive reading of the vesting clause to contemporary selection mechanisms.

Two claims of presidential authority—presidential representation and the unitary executive theory—were contested during the legislative battle over the reorganization of the executive branch in the late 1930s. A unitary executive theory envisioned top‐down control of the executive branch, while a theory of presidential representation tied the president's purported national viewpoint to a larger role in policy making. I argue that, in passing the Reorganization Act of 1939, Congress rejected the unitary executive theory but cautiously endorsed the idea of presidential representation. As later shown in Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha, however, Congress' accommodation of presidential representation did not provide a very firm foundation for presidential reorganization authority.

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