The presidency and is one of the nations leading constitutional scholars especially with regard to president ial power and the author of an equally excellent previous book imperial from the beginning that the constitution of the original executive, Jack Goldsmith is the henry l professor of law at harvard, it is someone who youre probably aware has seen the executive branch from the inside during a high profile, extremely tense tenure in the Bush Administration office of Legal Counsel during a key early. On the war on terror, jack is one of our thoughtful commentators on the modern presidency and then the atlantic, and books like the terror presidency and power and constraint. So it is one of the most misleadingly titled books in recent memory. It makes a convincing case the original design the framers had for the presidency that office had little in the way of Emergency Powers or independent war powers and no rightful claim to executive privilege that shielded its inner workings from congressional demand for information. When i initially read it i said to myself if that is an imperial presidency i will take it. In your new book you cover and expand some of those themes but abca11 the living presidency is about what the office has become now. An institution with fullspectrum dominance over American Life and law. In telling the story how we got here you point to a somewhat counterintuitive culprit, the notion of a living constitution which is something we tend to associate with activists judges and leftleaning scholars, on the features of the socalled imperial presidency. Tell us about the living presidency, its relationship with the living constitution. And tell us about the fun house mirror version of the original presidency and can we ever go back. And jack in the audience, my connection goes back, and the institute events, including events, and arms subsidies. Im glad to be with you folks, you are experts on the modern presidency, you have superb books. And jeans book the cult of the presidency and the terror presidency, my book fits in the same genre. You should definitely get it. And why do progressives favor a living constitution the changes with time but simultaneously disfavor, lament a living, changeable, mutable presidency . We see this phenomenon all the time, liberals progressives, and, james madison, Alexander Hamilton about what a high crime and misdemeanor is. And a lot of progressives believe that modern times call for a modern update constitution. I use the title the living presidency to provoke progressives and make them think about what i think is a contradiction between their professed admiration for a change in constitution for the soft spot, what is wrong with an imperial presidency that grows over time if you can have an imperial congresses legislative powers can change over time or an imperial judiciary his rollover Constitutional Rights in the creation and expansion of them change over time. Living constitutionalism systematically favors the presidency, and whether this happened through article 5. And we expect, and proor affirmativeaction, pro iran antishutdowns with respect to covid19. They gratify our desires, express constitutional visions, articulate them and defend them and appoint justices and judges will carry on that legacy long after they are gone. They were just agents of Franklin Roosevelt not in the sense that he was looking over their shoulder but picked people that had the same constitutional vision of unchecked federal legislation, and in terms of influencing constitutional change, but when i argue there is no Single Person with greater influence over the shape of constitutional law than the presidency, not even Anthony Kennedy had as much. My third point is the balance of Political Forces systematically favors the presidency when it comes to constitutional disputes or statutory disputes. As president s graph for Additional Authority to implement their policies or policy agendas often favored by copartisans, they rely on a bedrock of Popular Support by their allies in the public. Americans, you and me. If we favor a law and the president divers funds to build the wall we will find ourselves defending the president s actions and their legality without regard whether what we think in our heart of hearts of those actions are legal, a partisan agenda that they coshare. Congress which is supposed to divide partisanship of the sword i just mentioned but also divided bicameral and that innervates congress, trying to stop a unitary executive when driven by factions, party, and the presidency is like a fighter jet and congress is like a sitting duck Aircraft Carrier and that was very ponderous and the presidency is typically going to win. My final point is nothing is sacrosanct. If the presidency acquires the power to wage war, the power to declare if the presidency can acquire legislative authority with expressed congressional delegation and doctrines like the chevron doctrine but interpretive legal interpretations of statutes. To bypass the effect on treaty power. There is nothing the president cant do with respect to the bounds of article 2. Anything you think is a fundamental feature of article 2 need not because with the passage of time and accretion of propresident ial practices, what was once thought to be obvious will no longer be with the appreciation of these practices but, a signal feature the president today that everybody agrees on can be undone in a year or two or ten years. Nothing is sacrosanct about article 2 including the oath. If we can reimagine article 2 in various ways and we have, why cant we reimagine or reunderstand the article to president ial oath which is very specific, it can do it over time and be given new meaning by new generations. I will end with those four points. I do end with a hopeful note, with a bakers dozen of Reforms Congress could enact to check the presidency. This is the perfect time to do that. We dont know who the next president is going to be and members of Congress Might be willing to oppose the current president because they are worried about what if joe biden or bernie sanders. It ends on a hopeful note but to get the full thrust of it you have to buy the book. Thank you so much. Over to you. Please do send those questions in on the event page or over twitter, youtube. Ready . Thank you very much. In honor to talk about this, this is one of the best books on president ial power. There are few people more expert on the history of the presidency and legal constraints of the presidency and original understanding of the legal constraints on the presidency. I love the book, learned a lot from it and my job is not to praise the book but to raise some questions and i have four points, they dont quite match up but they do a little bit. Saikrishna prakash is right that president ial power has gone steadily up over time because president s are in a better position to take the initiative, interpret laws and constraints and expand their powers and no doubt the courts, the executive branch is ultimately the most consequential interpreter of the constitution when it comes to executive power, can interpret its own powers, can act on that and put the other branches on the offensive. I want to say, Saikrishna Prakash acknowledges this, congress and the courts go along with every step of it. Everything he talks about in the book, the rise of war powers, the administrative state, almost all of it, 90 say congress has gone along or appropriated in ever larger and larger military which enables the president use to his military power broadly. Congress created the administrative state. The court basically accepted it. Over the arc of history, pushing back the margins and accepting the growth in president ial power. We are talking about the undoubted growth of the executive to a place where it is completely different than the framers expected but acquiesced in all 3 branches of the government. But it is enabled because of that as well. As Saikrishna Prakash says in the book whether we like or not we live under a regime of informal constitutional and legal change, with the text of our federal constitution and National Laws may not change that often. Their meanings can and do. This is an accurate statement of the way executive power has gone over the centuries but i want to emphasize this is not a recent phenomenon. This is the way constitutional interpretation and change happen from the beginning. Saikrishna prakash is critical of executive agreement in the book, these are substitutes for treaty power, statutory authorization for the president to make executive agreements which make it easier to make executive agreements than treaty power. It seems pretty obvious the framers thought International Agreements would have to go through the senate process, in 1792, an agreement that authorized the post office to make agreements for International Postal another example is George Washington in 1793 asserted very broad conception, impishly very broad conception of executive power in declaring neutrality in the european war and in claiming the ability to prosecute those who violated the statute even without congressional legislation. There was a famous debate between madison and hamilton and the debaters who knows who won . Everybody has a different view but from the beginning the president was making very contested interpretations of his own powers to expand executive power. My first two points i this has been going on since the beginning and the courts of acquiesced into it. The third point, i want to take issue with Saikrishna Prakash besides claim that tying the rise of executive power to progressive view of the constitution living constitutionalism. It is accurate for the most part. Most of the Twentieth Century from the beginning of the progressive era throughout the new deal, through the 50s in the 60s it was progressives and progressive thinkers who favored a heroic presidency and conservative thinkers in that period believed in a constrained presidency at a presidency constrained by congress and intrinsically constrained but i would say in the last 40 years it has been conservatives. There is a range of opinion but that is interesting in itself but conservative governments that have embraced executive power in the name of a regionalism. This got going in the 80s, too long a story to tell, got going in the 80s, rediscovered unitary executive as a function of the original understanding and they embraced a robust conception of executive power as a matter of the original understanding. An important intervention in this debate, john you wrote his famous article in the 1960s explaining the president as an original matter raise on original materials, raised military force without congressional authorization. Both Bush Administrations under the guise of originalist thinking embraced extremely broad conceptions of executive power to set aside statutory restrictions especially war powers but not limited to that. It was conservatives, fair to say, in the guise of justice scalia, others pushing the chevron doctrine. It is a mixed story about whether it is progressivism or regionalism that has been the font of the growing executive. If you look at the obama administration, the main sins of executive power were wielding executive power, wielding delegations very aggressively and using it to take power to enforce or not enforce statutes but the signal position of the Bush Administration wielding executive principles, the central executive power principle they are known for his disregarding statutes under the name of article 2 based on the original understanding. This is not a 1sided story about original versus progressive and i attorn i applaud William Barrs speech at the Federalist Society last fall on the basis of original principles contemplated abroad robust executive. My last point is talking about reform. I have an excellent menu of 13 reforms that he proposes and three reforms which he thinks arent constitutional on originalist grounds but for congress to consider in light of executive aggrandizement. I have two things to say about this but raise a larger point, then i will stop. The first thing is some of these proposals suffer from the inside outside problem. We can get rid of that jargon. What they mean is the reason we got in right now in terms of massive executive power, congress has for a variety of structural reasons come incapable of governing, they have given delegations across every conceivable topic and the president has been happy to receive those. There are mechanisms behind that that inform why congress has done that so the question is once we get to the reform era how do we have a congress that as Saikrishna Prakash proposes stops regulating executive power . How will we have a congress that will as i suggest basically cut the military budget by 75 if the president uses force without congressional authorization . Some of the reforms are realistic. Some of the reforms are not realistic based on the premises of the book about congressional abdication of power. The last point is i am not even sure, i wonder what Saikrishna Prakash thinks of this. If he got every single one of his reforms, set aside a delegation problem. Of congress inc. Power that would certainly cut back on the executive. I question whether in our modern government given the complexity of it that congress could do that. The we could go back to the old model, congress legislates clearly and narrowly in the president enforces the law. That was the model. With every other reform Saikrishna Prakash proposes even if they were implemented without cut back the executive very much. It is nibbling at the margins. Sometimes thinner margins but the reason we have such a powerful president for better or worse and some days i like it and some days i dont, depend on the context, the reason we have such a powerful presidency is because our government and our society have grown more complex, the structures in congress have not been able to deal with those. It is not just in the United States but in every country around the world, massive delegation of executive power. I am not sure the reforms would cut back certainly not to 1789 or before 1937. I will stop there. Those were critical comments but this is an extraordinary book and i recommend it very highly. I had a couple questions of my own. Why dont we go to Saikrishna Prakash for his response to those points. You are not on. Apologies. I thank jack for his excellent comments and agree with the last comment. As far as four principle comments go i agree with the first and the fourth. He is right that it is going to be hard for congress to overcome its tendencies. In a book written by a scholar, typically not the way Congress Reforms itself, it takes a measure of introspection and a cataclysmic event for congress to reform itself. May be that is the trump administration. I also agree there were disputes to president ial power in the early years of the washington administration, all kinds of disputes from the beginning. They werent about no claim the president could wage war. I dont think the Postal Convention comes close to what happened with respect to the treaty power today in terms of the erosion of the senate check. The third comment about progressives versus originalist as the progenitors of the modern presidency, jack is right that there are people who are originalists who think the founders created a strong presidency. I am one of them but i think the presidency was meant to be limited as well. My point is the modern presidency is transgressing a lot of those limits. In the book i briefly talk about whether originalists are faithful to originalist and when they defend the idea the president can wage war without congressional authorization and i argue not, but most of my iron is aimed at progressives, jack is right that president ial change occurred before the theory of a living constitution to group. I think the theory is an accelerant to that change. Let me pick up on a couple of those points particularly jacks point. I agree the growth of president ial power has been like many horrible things bipartisan mistake. With the progressives being more responsible in the early part of the Twentieth Century, the last 40 years conservatives giving them a run for their money. One thing that occurred to me as i was reading the book, why would a living constitutionalist say about this theory, for example, a living constitutionalist can have no foundational objections to informal constitutional change. Is that right . Saying that the constitution can, should, whether we like it or not, does evolve doesnt mean youre in different, that all change is legitimate. The fact of a malleable constitution certainly empowers and puts the executive branch and the best position to force constitutional change but you have a couple of foils. In the book, living constitutionalists, one is zach herman, another is David Strauss. Could they say by their criteria, these changes arent legitimate. Ackerman has a constitutional moment theory where sweeping changes like the new deal or the civil rights revolution are typically followed and ratified by a historic election, wouldnt ackerman say truman launching the war in korea without congressional authorization was nothing like that, he wasnt vindicated elections, he left office deeply unpopular, David Strauss would say my theory is it is mostly focused on judges, commonlaw constitutionalism is an evolutionary mostly judicial driven process and launching a war is not what i meant at all. I wonder if you could expand a little on that and a related question. Fairweather constitutionalists, when it gets the political results they want and not fairweather they are originalists. Much easier on fairweather originalists. You dont mention any of them by name. There is one passage that stuck at me in that section. When it comes to the presidency it sometimes seems originalists apply different rules. Some originalists imagine the founders created a presidency meant to enjoy Plenary Authority over many affairs. It is a masterpiece of understatement. The Federalist Society is not a monolith. It has been caricatured. The dominant view is Something Like the paddles on executive power, something more like john you. The two questions, what a living constitution only by this . My method for my argument, you cant hang this on me, not so easy on the fairweather originalists. These are great questions. Let me start by responding to the last question. It is fair, and the point is i should have discussed original is him more, i was thinking of john in that section. That is a section designed in part to respond to him. All the claims about war power our responses to him. More should have been done. I have been on these panels and i have views on president ial power that are quite broad, the president can direct and fire federal officials, and on the original understanding and my understanding, i hope i am right and others can claim i am wrong. More could have been done. With respect to how living constitutionalists and professor strauss, professor ackerman would say it doesnt meet his criteria. Tried to respond to that, lots of people who believe in nonarticle 5 amendments. Professor ackerman has a theory and is free to say these changes dont satisfy these steps. Most dont have such a highly structured or constipated complicated. Of constitutional change. Having said that it is not possible to say in advance these changes to the presidency havent satisfied ackermans steps. You have to do the inquiry, the hard work ackerman purports to do. If you look at ackermans work overtime hes finding constitutional amendments over time. He is not saying i have discovered all the nonarticle 5 amendments, what he is saying is i studied this theory and learned congressional executive agreements are constitutional and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is constitutional, his universe of informal constitutional amendments that satisfy his criteria is changing over time. David strausss book on the living constitution is wonderful. He doesnt have detailed criteria for when we are to recognize a change in the living constitution and much of its description of constitutional change is a claim the constitution changed even before certain amendments. If you look at his discussion of the seventeenth amendment, he writes as if the idea of popular elections was constitutional before the formal text was enacted. I dont think he can say no aspects of the living presidency are constitutional because they are not judge driven. He has a role for congress to play a role for the people to play. Not just judge driven theory of constitutional change. If it is, then obviously i dont think that necessarily. I have another question. Trump. It was inevitable, getting ready for this, i asked if trump had done anything shocking and horrible in the last halfhour we needed to be current on. I dont know if any of us checked. You have a description which seems to me perfectly accurate, the presidency has amassed power. As i was reading it, trump has not exactly followed in this pattern. With regard to the pandemic. To suffer an event that would kill many more people than 9 11 and do more economic than the 2008 financial crisis i would have said there will be a massive accumulation of president ial power. President power tends to grow in crisis. Despite the unhinged craig theories of executive power that have come out at coronavirus briefings, total authority over the state and that sort of thing, where the rubber meets the road the actual use of executive power with respect to the pandemic has been fairly restrained. You almost dont want to use the word restrained because it is not as though there is a deep constitutional scruple, cincinnatus like virtue that is operating here, but you would have expected a more significant concentration of power. You wrote a couple of columns about this. How do you account for that, what do you think is going on with trump and chloroquine for in the Trump Presidency in general. With respect to trump and covid19. My sense is the president s calling card would be the economy and he was going to run on the economy but given he doesnt want to flex executive power to order shutdowns of states because that would make it harder for him to get elected, i think he is forbearing claiming or using executive power principally because he doesnt see that it will help them electorally. It is a weird situation where choosing not to do something increasing the chances that state governors or state legislatures will keep their economy going. It is still a bridge too far for the president to claim that he can force states to allow private businesses to conduct a business. He is not able to find anybody who will tell him mister president , you not only have the authority to shut down the economy but you have the authority to force it back open. If somebody were telling him this it is possible he might try to seize that authority. In terms of the Trump Presidency more generally this isnt a book about the Trump Presidency. I didnt want to focus on him. I thought that would be distorting the general thesis of the book. I view the Trump Presidency is more of the same. I dont view it is fundamentally different, the president is prone to making exaggerated claims about his president ial authority but that is in keeping with his penchant for boasting. In terms of the actual claims being made you can find similar claims being made across the prior administrations. They may be in service of different political ends or different policy ends that are the same claims. Spending money or reallocating money with respect to the wall has its parallels with respect to propping up obamacare and subsidizing insurance companies. The attacks on syria have a parallel with respect to the war in libya. You can go on and on. Different people complained about different president s, obama and democrats complaining about trump but the actions are not fundamentally different. Jack . One thing about trump and then a question for Saikrishna Prakash. Following up on what Saikrishna Prakash said, trump has been bombastic in his claims on executive power, he has exercised executive power like the pardon power of the firing power aggressively but not unlawfully. The characteristic excesses of his predecessors arent his. I dont think he has been as aggressive and imaginative in expanding and manipulating power as president obama was. He has not engaged in disregarding statutes with elaborate and aggressive theories president bush did. He has not followed through on what he said he would do on the campaign trail. Innocence trump is a menacing figure, i think he is a menacing figure for many reasons but primarily doing things that arent at the edges of executive power but things president s didnt do because norms constrain them. In some sense the emergency power stuff is in line with this. A question for Saikrishna Prakash is, i dont know what the answer to this is, executive power has been growing steadily. It took a sharp turn upwards in the civil war, took a sharp turn after, during the new deal and world war ii and has been rising steadily ever since. As we discussed this has been a reaction to changes, congress and the courts went along with it. What is the status, what is your view on original is him . You attributed to living constitutional, but it has been going on since the beginning. Is allied by constitutional history, a normative theory about the way the constitution should be interpreted but belied by our history or is there a way, as you know scholars have been trying to reconcile a version of that with liquidation through practice. You think there is a version of original is him that can do that . To ping off of jacks comment about trump jack is largely right the trump hasnt been as aggressive as his critics have suggested, but it is a good thing in the way people push back on claims of executive power because if you dont push back it is an open door, push the door open and do what you want. There is a value in people exaggerating claims, exaggerating the scope of president ial claims. With respect to jacks thoughtful question. For the First Century there were disputes about the constitutions meaning, the removal power, the scope of necessary and proper cause, the scope of the commerce clause, all kinds of legal questions and the answers drift over time. That will happen anywhere. You are not always going to be able to stay true the original meaning even if that is what you think you are going to do that. Is like the game of telephone is you convey a message to someone and the message gets garbled in the transmission and by the end of the process ten people later the message is very different. I dont take dispute about the scope of president ial congressional power as signaling that original is him and and the fact that hamilton and madison disagreed about the neutrality proclamation in 1793 doesnt suggest it is a failure because i dont think originalism suggest definitive answers to all questions or reasonable disagreements or unreasonable disagreements. I think hamilton was right. Where people are openly contemplating the idea that the text remains the same but the meaning audit change over time, when to do that, its entirely open to ones imagination as to what those words mean and what we can have the meeting, i give an example of Woodward Wilson who is definitely in favor of what he calls the constitution, at the same time he argued that the president should never pervert statues to pursue policy end, he seemed to think it was immoral and i point out when to say the meaning of the constitution can change over time, why would be the case of the president could never acquire authority to pervert statues through ingenious interpretation, i basically claimed that wilson was in fish efficiently wilsonian in his embrace of living constitutionalism which is a war basic claim with respect more generally, i do think original us could be wrong about the original constitution, i think that jack is right, president s in the mantle of the founders to make arguments about the original presidency at a wrong and that is an originalist argument and being used in service but i still would do believe it would be less hard to evaluate in the claim that the constitution means it can and ought to overtime, once you say that you are basically liberating every Single Branch to acquire power including the president and as i argued, the presidency is best situated to do that more so than the other institutions, its hard for congress to articulate congressional power because its hard for them to pack to the statute must less than an opinion, they upon episodically in the context of real cases. I think it is true that there all kinds of constitutional disputes early on but i dont think that the failure of a regionalism, in terms of the theory, i think it is a tremendous scholar, im a little dubious of a theory of an originalist theory which says that the constitution has an original meaning but if people get it wrong, the wrongness itself can be treated if it were right on grounds that that is part of the original understanding of the constitution, that is to say if you get something wrong long enough we are to continue following it, i dont think there is a lot in favor of that, madison does it himself say this, i think early practices can liquidate into a solid understanding of the constitution but will contemplate liquidation and reliquidation as a practices change it is possible to read madison saying the new practices are themselves going to be understood at an originalist understanding of the constitution. I think that is a bridge too far, i dont know if thats a proper reading of madison. I want to call get his many questions as possible the remaining minutes, this is kind of my fault i was growing up and instead of scrolling down into my surprise i saw a bunch of questions, many more than i thought lets just say this is the lightning round i will give you two, at least one of them you have touched on at least in your most recent remarks, this is from jack, if im pronouncing that right, if disputes of the president ial power has been going on since a beginning or at least 1793 as jack said, does that not destroy the idea that there was a coherent extent of the executive power at the outset and the one by samuel, why a regionalism, we seen originalist arguments on the right, contribute to expanding president ial powers, that the left is selectively and strategically originalist may mean, both of those questions from the main website. To take up, i think thats a wonderful response, i think what i would say, only a theory of fixed meaning of hope of corralling the presidency, that is to say a regionalism properly understood as our constitution contemplates that the meaning of the constitution is fixed and itself doesnt have the seeds of its own amendment by formal means, i think if youre trying to contain the presidency, a regionalism provides a formula, where as when to start with the premise of the meaning of the constitution can and should change over time, you are making it quite possible for the president to change the office that he is sworn to face the execute and effectively as i argue in the book meaningless, i think a regionalism holds the promise of containing the presidency in a way that the living constitution does not, professor is an old friend, i think professors question is very similar to jacks, i think the existence of regional dispute about the fringes of executive power does nothing to call into question the idea that a regionalism solves or answer certain questions, can the president start a war, i think the originalist answer no john has written a long article noting otherwise but he doesnt have anyone from the founding adopting his approach in the face of quotes from madison, hamilton, the apostle executive power, George Washington, henry knox, thomas jefferson, there is no one at the founding that thought that the president could start a war because they understand that would mean to declare, there are difficult questions with respect to the president ial power just like difficult questions with legislative power and theres easy questions from the originals point of view, the existence of hard questions i dont think makes a regionalism fatally unattractive ill put it that way. Patrick for, with regard to removal power, do you think congress can ever permissibly place removal limitations on executive officers . It seems that would be a way to rain and executive power with the hope and the necessary proper class. Thats a great question. I have written about this but not in this book, it does not discuss Removal Authority at all, i think the basic question, what is the horizontal effect of the speaking clause, maybe the necessary in speaking because, if you think that congress can put a removal restraint on the president , i think you have to ask what else can congress do to the president and or the courts, my basic view of executive power is fundamentally about the power to execute the law which i believes means a president can control the execution of law by supporting executive officers and personnel. But id analogize a giving more protection to the clerk of the court, can congress say to the clerk of the court you will have clause protection and you can enter any judgments you want about who won this case without regard to what the judge actually wants, if you think you can do that you can likewise do with respect to the president. This does not seemed like an obvious compared order or an obviously good comparison but judges decide the meaning of the law when they decide cases in my view the president decides the meaning of the law is the chief executive of the executive branch, i think is deeply problematic to regard congress as having the authority with restrictions on the removal of executive offices, now having said that, the Supreme Court does not think that i am right and the Supreme Court has endorsed all clause protections, theyve done so in a muddled w way, they never explained wide be constitutional for independent prosecutors but not constitutional for the department of commerce, maybe the court will enlighten us in the months to come. Question from sam from the cato site, could the fact that both houses of congress are really controlled by the Closing Party be part of the problem . At least one chamber of commerce is predisposed toward not hamstringing the president s ability to accomplish his agenda, i think you talk about some of this in the book and the separation a party, not power. Sam is absolutely right, i have a section called houses divided, its on lincolns house divided cannot stand in the basic point and thereby institution of partisanship into two chambers cannot stand up to the president or find it more difficult, i asked the reader to think about how would congress ability check the president if it was unicameral or, would be, it would not be easy necessarily because it would still be a plural institution with many different members pulling in different directions, it would be far easier if we had a unicameral Continental Congress as to compared to two chambers, that is absolutely right. Question from peter in oregon, why has Congress Even so much with things like trade, congress has gone along with us as jack says but basically the problem with delegation, why does it happen . I think respect toward power, the typical story that i agree with his congress does not want to be responsible for these earth shattering decisions to send american troops overseas and potentially die in a foreign land, that explains congressional reticence to weigh in on wars, they dont want to criticize the president and find out that the war is a Great Success or its over three days later, they dont want to criticize the president because of a be construed of criticizing the troops, why are you criticizing this military option when our boys and girls are overseas, with respect to trade, i dont have a story, i dont know enough about the legislative history for trade authority to figure that out but i suspect is to give the president flexibility with respect to trade when they thought the president was predisposed to free trade, trump is the first antifreetrade president that we have had in decades and they gave us authority in the context when they thought the president would be more willing to raise them and they found out that this president does not have that policy preference, for precise reason im not sure i know the reason why. I think thats all the time that we have, i want to thank sai and jack for participating and i want to recommend go out and get a copy of the living presidency, there is a link on the cato page on the event page to get this book which george will says with this explicitly time book and how we arrived todays to recase the executive lines and i want to apologize anyone who did not get there questions addressed, we have a lot of them rolling and we were able to get all of them but we participate in the future and the video recording of this event will be on the website tomorrow for anyone who wants to watch, think again to jack inside and thanks to all of you for tuning in. 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