I don't actually listen to a lot of John Yoo, but Reinsch has a pretty good podcast. John Yoo used to be a "never Trump" guy, but talks in this podcast about how Trump has been a defender of traditional constitutional law and values more than other presidents in the modern area. Yoo has the creds to be listened to IMO (John Yoo is the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. He’s a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the American Enterprise Institute. He worked in the Department of Justice under President George W. Bush and was General Counsel to the US Senate Judiciary Committee and has written and published numerous other books. He’s been on Liberty Law Talk to discuss them a few times, and he’s widely cited and published in a number of other forums.) Worth a listen, but you can read the podcast transcript here if you want.
https://lawliberty.org/podcast/the-...tumC65WzJebKV4VCGqNSEhW4ymiRUffyDesokFTfSMhvg
Excerpts:
"We see his critics are the ones who are proposing radical Constitutional change, it seems to me. His critics are the ones who are proposing to abolish the Electoral College, to start manipulating the size of the Supreme Court just because you don’t like the outcomes and add six justices to the Court, to make independent counsels permanent and criminalize our politics again, and nationalize the energy and transport sectors, and you go on and on. So what I found looking back on the last four years is I’ve found Trump was the one who was relying, in my view, on very traditional understandings of presidential power, who was obeying the courts, who was citing congressional delegations’ authority. Now, I think politically he’s been a disruptor, and you’ve had a lot of guests on who’ve talked about the way the presidency has operated the last four years as a political matter. But when it came to the Constitution, I thought Trump actually was mostly defending himself and the constitutional traditions we have from a left that really wants to overturn the way we’ve run for the last 220 years. "
"It’s a great point, Richard, because I didn’t think of it that way before, the way you put it. But if you look at many people who are originalist or conservative, their criticism of the modern presidency has been, “Oh, the presidency has become this unconstitutional innovator, someone who’s always trying to change things, he’s radical.” This was actually what the liberal theorists of the presidency in the ’60s and ’70s wanted out of their president. They wanted them to break through and change things. You’re quite right, Richard. If you think about it in the way I look at issue by issue, Trump is actually using presidential power in a more minimalist, I guess you could call it, fashion. He’s trying to defend the core powers of the presidency. He’s not really using those powers to innovate. He’s almost using it to defend. "
"… And I found myself several times responding to questions and just going back over basic points of executive power and the Constitution and then how that had been augmented not by Trump but by progressives in the early twentieth century and enlarged to its present state and how we do have a federal statutory presidency that’s been greatly expanded through delegation of authority discretionary powers as well. "
"His critics said, “We not only have the right to review the legality of what the president did, the executive order on banning entry into the country, we have the right to guess what was in the president’s mind when he issues or she issued that order. And, in doing so, we’re allowed to guess at what the president was thinking before he was even president.” But the sense in this case and the lower court decisions that tried to stop Trump went through all of the things he had said as a candidate before he was even employed by the United States government as evidence that Trump was a closet racist and was trying to achieve racist objectives with an order which was otherwise, now at this point, facially constitutional, I think, well-rooted in delegated power from Congress. Think about what would happen to the running of the executive branch if someone could sue and just say, “Well, I don’t care what the president’s order says or what this delegation does. I question the motives behind it.” You could tie up every single decision in the government with that kind of rule. People didn’t care, though, because they were out to stop Trump."
"Even though his party had control of Congress and the presidency, they got very little done because the presidency was consumed with him defending his own legitimacy. The things that he did do, it’s interesting, I think that they were efforts to narrow the federal government. One of the big things I think he’s done that people don’t pay attention to, I put a whole chapter in my book about those, the deregulation, shrinking the size of government, pulling the federal government back out of interference in state matters. These are not things presidents usually do, and they’re very hard to track and it’s not very sexy for the media, but the extent Trump’s been doing anything, he’s been using his constitutional powers to reduce the federal government’s agenda and activism than he’s been expanding it, which is what we usually elect presidents on after their first terms."
https://lawliberty.org/podcast/the-...tumC65WzJebKV4VCGqNSEhW4ymiRUffyDesokFTfSMhvg
Excerpts:
"We see his critics are the ones who are proposing radical Constitutional change, it seems to me. His critics are the ones who are proposing to abolish the Electoral College, to start manipulating the size of the Supreme Court just because you don’t like the outcomes and add six justices to the Court, to make independent counsels permanent and criminalize our politics again, and nationalize the energy and transport sectors, and you go on and on. So what I found looking back on the last four years is I’ve found Trump was the one who was relying, in my view, on very traditional understandings of presidential power, who was obeying the courts, who was citing congressional delegations’ authority. Now, I think politically he’s been a disruptor, and you’ve had a lot of guests on who’ve talked about the way the presidency has operated the last four years as a political matter. But when it came to the Constitution, I thought Trump actually was mostly defending himself and the constitutional traditions we have from a left that really wants to overturn the way we’ve run for the last 220 years. "
"It’s a great point, Richard, because I didn’t think of it that way before, the way you put it. But if you look at many people who are originalist or conservative, their criticism of the modern presidency has been, “Oh, the presidency has become this unconstitutional innovator, someone who’s always trying to change things, he’s radical.” This was actually what the liberal theorists of the presidency in the ’60s and ’70s wanted out of their president. They wanted them to break through and change things. You’re quite right, Richard. If you think about it in the way I look at issue by issue, Trump is actually using presidential power in a more minimalist, I guess you could call it, fashion. He’s trying to defend the core powers of the presidency. He’s not really using those powers to innovate. He’s almost using it to defend. "
"… And I found myself several times responding to questions and just going back over basic points of executive power and the Constitution and then how that had been augmented not by Trump but by progressives in the early twentieth century and enlarged to its present state and how we do have a federal statutory presidency that’s been greatly expanded through delegation of authority discretionary powers as well. "
"His critics said, “We not only have the right to review the legality of what the president did, the executive order on banning entry into the country, we have the right to guess what was in the president’s mind when he issues or she issued that order. And, in doing so, we’re allowed to guess at what the president was thinking before he was even president.” But the sense in this case and the lower court decisions that tried to stop Trump went through all of the things he had said as a candidate before he was even employed by the United States government as evidence that Trump was a closet racist and was trying to achieve racist objectives with an order which was otherwise, now at this point, facially constitutional, I think, well-rooted in delegated power from Congress. Think about what would happen to the running of the executive branch if someone could sue and just say, “Well, I don’t care what the president’s order says or what this delegation does. I question the motives behind it.” You could tie up every single decision in the government with that kind of rule. People didn’t care, though, because they were out to stop Trump."
"Even though his party had control of Congress and the presidency, they got very little done because the presidency was consumed with him defending his own legitimacy. The things that he did do, it’s interesting, I think that they were efforts to narrow the federal government. One of the big things I think he’s done that people don’t pay attention to, I put a whole chapter in my book about those, the deregulation, shrinking the size of government, pulling the federal government back out of interference in state matters. These are not things presidents usually do, and they’re very hard to track and it’s not very sexy for the media, but the extent Trump’s been doing anything, he’s been using his constitutional powers to reduce the federal government’s agenda and activism than he’s been expanding it, which is what we usually elect presidents on after their first terms."
