The Supreme Court's landmark decision on former President Donald Trump's immunity from some legal prosecution has potential to transform the powers of the presidency.

Our Jeffrey Brown takes a deeper look at how the ruling fits with

history. How much power for the executive branch? What kind of legal restraints?

Those are questions that have been debated since the beginning of the country.

But now by any account, there's been a major new development.

We look at the past and potential future with historian Heather Cox Richardson, a professor

at Boston College.

And welcome back to the program.

Let's do start with history.

What do you see when you look at these early debates about presidential power that might help us think about now?

Well, I want to be clear that in fact there hasn't been much dispute about the power of the president

since the founding of the United States of America.

The people who framed the Constitution,

as well as the people who wrote the Declaration of Independence,

were very clear that they did not want a king,

that it was important for the chief executive to have guardrails around him at the time is what they thought, and that those, that it was imperative that the president always was answerable to the law.

So we had Alexander Hamilton, for example,

in Federalist 69 being very clear

that the president could be impeached, the president could be convicted of treason or bribery or high

crimes or misdemeanors, could be removed from office and crucially would always, as he said, be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary

course of law.

They contrasted that with a king.

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