Executive Orders

The conventional wisdom holds that the president of the United States is weak, hobbled by the separation of powers and the short reach of his formal legal authority. In this first-ever in-depth study of executive orders, Kenneth Mayer deals a strong blow to this view. Taking civil rights and foreign policy as examples, he shows how presidents have used a key tool of executive power to wield their inherent legal authority and pursue policy without congressional interference.

Throughout the nation's life, executive orders have allowed presidents to make momentous, unilateral policy choices: creating and abolishing executive branch agencies, reorganizing administrative and regulatory processes, handling emergencies, and determining how legislation is implemented. From the Louisiana Purchase to the Emancipation Proclamation, from Franklin Roosevelt's establishment of the Executive Office of the President to Bill Clinton's authorization of loan guarantees for Mexico, from Harry Truman's integration of the armed forces to Ronald Reagan's seizures of regulatory control, American presidents have used executive orders (or their equivalents)

The President is the key actor in civil rights policy -- its advance, reversal, or neglect. This book documents the critical role presidents have played in setting the agenda, framing the terms of the debate, and formulating specific policy goals with respect to civil rights. By identifying the limits of presidential influence as well as the impact of presidential leadership vis-a-vis the Congress and federal agencies, Shull is able to compare presidents in terms of rhetoric, performance, and effectiveness in this most controversial policy arena.

Expanding upon his work in A Kinder, Gentler Racism? Shull here incorporates the Clinton years, including case studies of the 1996 same-sex marriage controversy and the nominations of Lani Guinier and William Lee for the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

The processes of constitutional change in America are particularly difficult to understand because of the constant interaction between the constitutional document of 1787 and the wider set of understandings and practices surrounding that document. This work is the first to examine systematically the relationship between changes initiated by constitutional amendment and changes initiated by judicial interpretations or actions of the two elected branches of government. By examining and comparing all three mechanisms of constitutional revision, Vile offers a more complex and dynamic analysis of this important constitutional issue than can be found elsewhere in the literature.

With contributions by the leading presidency scholars, this book offers a comprehensive overview of the president's policy-making role and the ways this role structures the president's interaction with other institutions of government.

Richard Neustadts seminal work "Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership" has endured for nearly four decades as the core of academic study of the American presidency. Now, building on and challenging many of the arguments in Neustadts work, "Presidential Power: Forging the Presidency for the Twenty-first Century" offers reflections and implications from what we have learned about presidential power as the new century dawns.
These essays -including a new contribution by Neustadt himself -forge a solid reexamination of Neustadts "Presidential Power" that address questions raised but not resolved by his work. A notable aspect of this volumes analysis is the transformed institution of the presidency in the wake of the impeachment hearings of the countrys last twentieth-century president, Bill Clinton. From the portrayal of presidents as persuaders to the politics of presidential transitions, each of the constituent essays in this volume provides an engaging look at the state of the American presidency.