From The LA Times
By Dana D. Nelson

In answering Gwen Ifill’s question about vice presidential powers at last week’s debate, Joe Biden redirected attention to the still not very well known concept of the “unitary executive.”

Biden charged that Dick Cheney had become “the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history” because of his attempts to create a super-powerful unitary executive. Biden didn’t take time to explain exactly what he meant, but it’s an extremely important, poorly understood subject, and it’s time to question the presidential candidates — closely — about it.

Plenty of presidents have worked to increase presidential power over the years, but the theory of the unitary executive, first proposed under President Reagan, has been expanded since then by every president, Democrat and Republican alike. Reagan’s notion was that only a strong president would be able to dramatically limit big government. Perhaps drawing on a model for unitary corporate leadership in which the CEO also serves as chairman of the board, the so-called unitary executive promised undivided presidential control of the executive branch and its agencies, expanded unilateral powers and avowedly adversarial relations with Congress.

In the years that followed, Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society conservatives worked to provide a constitutional cover for this theory, producing thousands of pages in the 1990s claiming — often erroneously and misleadingly — that the framers themselves had intended this model for the office of the presidency.

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