I'm John Batchel. I welcome Professor John Yu, writing at the Civitas Outlook for Civitas Institute.

He is a distinguished visiting professor at the School of Civic Leadership at the University

of Texas at Austin.

Ten years after, Justice Antonine Scalia, and remarks and decisions and sentences that the

justice wrote for us when he was among us still are very important for all decisions, but upcoming ones particularly.

The concept that I'm learning from Professor Yu's essay at Civitas Outlook is the concept of the unitary executive.

This has to do with the structure of the Constitution

and checks and balances. What it means in practice is the power of the presidency in the executive

branch. John, a very good evening to you. What is the unitary executive? What is that referring to?

Good evening to.

Great to be with you, John. Justice Scalia used to often like to read great provisions on

individual rights, such a right to liberty, right to freedom. And then he would shock his listeners

by saying, that's from the Soviet Constitution.

Justice Scalia would then follow up by saying what's really important in a constitution is to get the separation of powers right, the structure of the Constitution right,

to make sure that you have a government that's powerful enough to be effective,

but not so powerful that it renders all

those individual liberties meaningless. And so Justice Scalia meant by the unitary executive,

an idea he introduced in 1988, just his second year on the court, was the idea that all of the executive power held by the federal

government must be vested in the president. He said that's what the text of the Constitution says.

That's what the structure means, so that each branch is independent and equal to each other. And what he worried about was that

Congress or even the courts would frank meant the executive power, would pull apart the president's

control over the agencies, that we as the people would not know who's responsible for the decisions

...