The Obama administration is going to leave behind a legacy of the abuses of executive power and the expansion of the administrative state. John Yoo is a law professor at UC Berkeley and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He served in the Justice Department from 2001 to 2003 and is the editor of Liberty’s Nemesis: The Unchecked Expansion of the State. Yoo joined the Federalist Radio Hour to discuss the founder’s intentions for balance of powers and how the expansion of the government explains so many political scandals in the last decade.
Congress has given so much power and so many resources to the President, Yoo said. “Congresses of both parties for many decades have contributed to this by giving more and more power to the agencies,” he said. “People are very dissatisfied with government because of this dynamic, because their representatives don’t make the laws. They transfer them to bureaucrats.”
Later in the hour, Yoo explains the war games he uses to teach students how easy it is to critique the government from the outside and after-the-fact. “When you’re inside, you make decisions with not that much information, under the pressure of circumstances, so the decision making is rushed and it’s interesting to see how people think through what to do.”
He applies this to the current candidates we are about to pick the next President from. We should pick presidents not because they are good legislators but because they made good decisions under fire. “That’s a different quality. Some people are good at it and some people are not good at it,” he said.
Click here to subscribe or listen below:
