PPESexton2026

  Brettschneider posits an alarming account of how vast executive power has been used to undermine fundamental democratic pillars like the right to dissent and the rule of law. Providing examples of past recorrections, and to prevent further ones, he promulgates a solution through “democratic constitutional constituencies” composed of ordinary citizens who read and interpret the Constitution for themselves. Notably, Brettschneider's account of executive accountability is not limited to scholars and ideologues; the burden equally rests on the shoulders of ordinary American citizens. He writes, "the Constitution isn’t the exclusive province of lawyers or judges...all Americans can be considered witnesses tasked with holding the president accountable to the Constitution." (15).  Thus rises a fervent polity of constitutional laymen, forming what Brettschneider dubs as “democratic constitutional constituencies”. These constituencies are groups of “citizen readers of the Consti...

  When we talk about the Constitution, we often talk as if it protects us, as if rights are stable guarantees enforced by courts/government. But reading Corey Brettschneider's The Presidents and the People after Shiffrin’s Unfit to Print complicates the picture, as constitutional rights start seeming less like automatic guarantees and more like protections that have to be constantly and actively defended.  Shiffrin helps explain the two kinds of danger in the Adams administration. One danger is official speech that makes dissent (either seem or be) legally unsafe. Shiffrin argues that officials violate the 1st Amendment when they create “rational grounds for uncertainty about whether the officials affirm the legal free speech protections they are responsible to uphold” (1001). The Sedition Act and the administration’s treatment of critics fit this concern.  A second danger is official falsehood that distorts public judgement. Shiffrin argues that “lies and culpable misre...

Brettschneider and Calvelli (2024) argue that the unitary executive theory's true ascendance was marked by Clinton letting the independent counsel statute expire, leaving politics rather than law as the constraint on presidents. Two years after this article was published, the unitary executive seems to be even further ascending.  Trump v. Slaughter , argued December 2025, asks the Court to overrule  Humphrey's Executor  and end for-cause removal protections for independent agency commissioners.  Trump v. Cook , argued January 2026, tests whether the Federal Reserve's removal protections survive a president who claims cause on grounds the law never contemplated. The Solicitor General called  Humphrey's  "a decaying husk." Chief Justice Roberts echoed this sentiment. The FEC, the FTC, the SEC, the Federal Reserve, and all other insulated executive role depend on protections that the Court appears poised to invalidate. The article's prescription for confronti...

 Corey Brettschneider's The Presidents and the People is fundamentally a book about how Americans come to understand their own democracy. The Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams offer the clearest early illustration, and to me, it exposed that the American constitutional order is not a fixed inheritance but a paradigm, one that gets revised precisely when it is most threatened. When Adams signed the Sedition Act, there was no settled constitutional consensus that prohibited it. The legal architecture we now take for granted—robust First Amendment protections, the illegitimacy of suppressing political opposition—did not exist as codified doctrine. What changed was not the text of the Constitution but the American people's understanding of what it meant and demanded. Thomas Cooper, prosecuted under the act, "Despite losing [his case,]... succeeded in his wider ambitions" (41). Cooper and the editors who rallied around him were the budding of America's first con...

In Corey Brettschneider's The Presidents and The People , he argues that the Constitution's allowance for centralized executive power has facilitated a cyclical pattern of crisis and recovery. In his introduction, he outlines how American history has revealed a continual pattern of rights being breached by Presidents, and subsequently rehabilitated by those who follow. Given his patterned framework, it should come as no surprise that statements from former presidents can seem remarkably pertinent even today. In Chapter 2 specifically, I found parallels between President Thomas Jefferson's qualms with the structure of government and issues relevant to today's political landscape. For instance, Brettschneider states:      "Jefferson later argued that of courts alone were trusted as the sole interpreters of constitutional rights,           they called mold those rights like “wax“ into whatever they wished. Overtime, the guarantees of the  ...

In Brettschnieder’s The Presidents and The People , I take issue with a lot of his background argument. His book hopes to detail five presidents who threatened democracy, John Adams, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Woodrow Willson and Richard Nixon as well as the citizens who fought to defend it. I clash with the idea that it is these five presidents that are the sole threats to democracy and all other structures of the United States are fit to be democratically equal. I think this view, while attempting to rectify American wrongs, is highly limited insofar as its inability to imagine outside the institutional level.  In detailing history about Washington, Brettschneider discusses the authenticity and inspiration of Washington's words (13). I think it would be a mistake to conflate Washington's intentions with the entire young nation's intentions. I find myself wondering if it's possible that Washington was such a unique man that he truly had no desire to derive power ...

Brettschneider begins by recounting Adams’ tenure as president, where he raged at the press, plotted with his attorney general to silence critics and passed the Sedition Act. Interestingly, the initial conception of freedom of speech is not how we conceive of it today. Indeed, Brettschneider writes how “democratic constitutional constituencies,” or ordinary citizens who used the Constitution as a metaphorical weapon against authoritarian presidents, were the likes of newspaper editors (4). Thomas Cooper, for example, argued at his own sedition trial that citizens could not “exercise on rational grounds their elective franchise, if perfect freedom of discussion of public characters be not allowed” (40). Editors like Cooper used court trials as a resistance mechanism to spread discourse about democracy and free speech, eventually leading to Jefferson’s election in 1800. Most interestingly, Brettschneider notes that this “did not come from self-correcting mechanisms inherent in the Cons...

 I want to examine the idea of wartime and its effect on presidential behavior, and opportunity for power grab. It seems that Madison was resistant to extending executive power during the War of 1812 because the war was so divisive between parties. And Adams used the tension from the French revolution to justify attacks on the opposing party. In the face of foreign policy issues, wartime has been the basis for presidential power grabs. I am wondering how the role of commander in chief of the military and chief diplomat with the constitutional role can be hijacked to justify unitary theories of presidential power.  James Madison is the ideal of the American President™ in the face of constitutional constituency, mob riots, and war, he was able to preserve the ideal of the freedom to dissent, “the result was a president who embraced the idea of popular sovereignty; even during war” (81). This trend died with Madison. Wartime has been the scene of the most blatant power grabs over...