A Weak Attack on William Barr’s Nomination to Be Attorney General
Finally, adopting a hysterical tone, Hemel and Posner write:
Remember when President Trump demanded “loyalty” from [former FBI director James] Comey? If Mr. Barr is confirmed as attorney general, it looks as though the president will get what he wanted. “He alone is the Executive branch,” Mr. Barr wrote of the president. The attorney general and the Justice Department lawyers “who exercise prosecutorial discretion on his behalf” are “merely ‘his hand.’” These bizarre statements are not those of a lawyer but of a courtier.
Actually, far from “bizarre statements,” Barr’s assertions reflect the views of the late, great Justice Antonin Scalia in his much-admired dissent in Morrison v. Olson (1988). The Constitution says, “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States.” As Justice Scalia memorably explained, “this does not mean some of the executive power, but all of the executive power.” Such estimable scholars as Hemel and Posner must know that Barr — far from sending a signal about “loyalty,” which former director Comey alleges President Trump demanded of him — was merely articulating the “unitary executive” theory. That theory, rooted in constitutional law, holds that Article II vests all executive power in a single official, the president; therefore, subordinates appointed to wield executive power, including government lawyers exercising prosecutorial discretion, do so as delegates of the chief executive. That, indeed, is why all executive officers serve at the pleasure of the president, who does not need a reason to dismiss them.
The professors and the Times may not like the unitary executive — most progressives do not, at least when the White House is not occupied by a Democrat. But it is beneath Hemel and Posner to pretend that the articulation of a venerable legal theory, advanced by a lawyer who is widely acclaimed to be exceptional and with whom the president was not acquainted until recently, is the flattery of a “courtier.”