Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Looks familiar somehow

Some guy named David B. Froomkin has a nice piece up at the Regulatory Review arguing that the Constitution’s Vesting Clause is not a broad grant of presidential power. It begins:

The Vesting thesis is back in the news.

Aditya Bamzai and Saikrishna Prakash recently published an article in which they returned to their exchange with Andrea Katz and Noah Rosenblum last year in the Harvard Law Review about the President’s power to remove executive officials from office. The debate centers on the Vesting Clause in Article II of the U.S. Constitution, which states that “the executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” The debate is primarily a historical one about which sources to rely on and how to interpret them in reconstructing Founding-era understandings of the meaning of “executive power.”

It is worth taking a step back from the historical discussion to appreciate the debate’s premises about how one ought to read the Constitution’s text.

Read the rest of Textual Tensions in the Vesting Thesis.