The Power of the Pen

Presidents often exercise enormous power through little more than the stroke of a pen. Harry Truman issued an executive order authorizing his Secretary of Commerce to seize and operate most of the nation's privately-owned steel mills, while Abraham Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus in a letter to one of his generals and instituted a blockade of southern ports with a presidential proclamation. The constitutional arguments in each instance are similar, and they bring up a fundamental question that we will continue to explore in the next few episodes: what powers do presidents have simply by virtue of being commander-in-chief and chief executive of a sovereign nation?

Om Podcasten

The 1787 Project is the podcast version of the lectures for Professor Justin Dyer's socially-distanced class on the U.S. Constitution at the University of Missouri. Running from August 2020 - May 2021, the course is about how the U.S. Constitution of 1787 frames the way we organize our life together as a political community. Published twice a week, the episodes explore who gets to decide big questions of public policy and why, analyze the design of our national political institutions and the contested boundaries between them, and look at the structure of constitutional rights.