2020 Candidates and Executive Power
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 13 November 2019
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As the 2020 race heats up, candidates spar over healthcare, immigration reform, affordable housing, and criminal justice issues. Unfortunately, substantive discussions about the candidates' views on executive power are seldom on the agenda. Since the 2008 election, the New York Time’s Charlie Savage has helped rescue the significance of questions of executive power. Savage surveys presidential candidates on a range of executive power questions and publishes their responses. This year, he presented candidates with questions about presidential war powers, military force against American citizens, presidential obstruction of justice, and more. Jack Goldsmith talked with Savage and Justin Florence of Protect Democracy about the history of the executive power survey, the value of the questionnaire, and the takeaways from responses to this year’s questions.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
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| 0:14.7 | That's patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:18.2 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:33.9 | It was a way into thinking about how a constitutional democracy in the United States was going to work |
| 0:40.0 | in the 21st century in the post-9-11 environment. |
| 0:43.2 | And it seemed to be, to me at least to be, one of the most important issues of the era. |
| 0:49.0 | And yet heading into the 2008 election as the primaries were unfolding in both the Democratic |
| 0:54.4 | and Republican parties, no one who was in a position to ask questions in the candidates |
| 0:59.9 | that is the largely television personalities who moderate these debates was going anywhere |
| 1:05.8 | near these questions. |
| 1:06.8 | They were asking all the usual questions about, you know, culture war issues and the sort |
| 1:12.0 | of policy issues of the day. |
| 1:14.0 | But at no point, could anyone be bothered or would it occur to them to say, by the way, |
| 1:19.7 | if you're elected president, do you think that you can invoke your role as commander |
| 1:23.9 | of chief to secretly bypass apparent legal constraints? |
| 1:30.3 | I'm Jacob Schultz and this is the LawFair podcast, November 12, 2019. |
| 1:36.4 | As the 2020 race heats up, candidates spar over healthcare, immigration reform, affordable |
| 1:41.6 | housing and criminal justice issues. |
| 1:44.2 | Unfortunately, substantive discussions about the candidate's views on executive power |
| 1:48.5 | are seldom on the agenda. |
... |
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