Hello, friends. I'm Jeffrey Rosen, President and CEO of the National Constitution Center,

and welcome to We the People, a weekly show of constitutional debate. The National Constitution

Center is a nonpartisan nonprofit, chartered by Congress, to increase awareness and understanding

of the Constitution among the American people.

This week, the NCC convened at George Washington's Mount Vernon for a conversation about executive power with Stephen Vladek of Georgetown University Law Center, Ilya Shapiro of the

Manhattan Institute, Adam White of the American Enterprise Institute. We had a wide-ranging discussion about the Trump administration and the Roberts Court.

Enjoy the show.

Let's begin with the big historical question that is transfixing the country right now.

Is President Trump Julius Caesar or Andrew Jackson?

In other words, does he represent the fulfillment of the founder's greatest fears about the consolidation of powers and the subversion of the rule of law?

Or does he represent the continuation of a vast expansion

of executive authority that's been taken advantage of by presidents

from both parties, and in that sense,

is very much part of a continuation of a historical trend.

Steve Vladik, let's begin with you. Great. Well, thanks for having all of us. It's really an

honor to be here. I'm going to give the profoundly unsatisfying answer both, which is to say that I think

that there are features of President Trump's actions over the first four months of the second term

that you could place on a historical line of sort of broad, slow accretion and accumulation of executive power.

For example, control over the administrative state.

For example, control over hiring and firing decisions within the executive branch.

And then there's a universe of actions that I think

are above and beyond any reasonable extension

...