Good Day Thomas Jefferson, Our podcast listeners, and as always thank you so much for listening.

This week we have, well it's a pretty interesting conversation about presidential power.

I think every American is thinking about these things.

We don't normally.

You don't in any given year, you don't really fixate much on the Constitution or

the Article 2 of the Constitution administrative powers the presidency etc. But I think we're living in a really interesting time and I

think everyone is all stirred up about this I think an election is coming and so that

always concentrates us it's only a couple of months away now

and we've been hearing some rumblings delay the election

the incumbent may not accept the results. You know, this is not, we're not operating under normal order.

When I was growing up, let's take the election of Richard Nixon in

1968, David. Heward Humphrey was the Democrat vice president and so he was in a sense the incumbent Johnson

had had withdrawn Richard Nixon was the challenger they fought a difficult

it was a crazy year maybe the craziest year of my lifetime, and in the end,

Richard Nixon won by a very small margin, but he won.

That's how it's supposed to work. That's how it's worked through almost the entirety of American history.

But we're in a period now where it doesn't work so well anymore.

We had the contested election in 2000 between George W Bush and Al Gore and it took weeks for the Supreme Court to make a determination there after which by the way

Vice President Gore gave a beautifully gracious speech saying that

although he was disappointed he accepted the results and that he would do

everything in his power to be a team player as we move forward into the

GW Bush administration for most of American history almost every transition.

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