The Federalist: The President
The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast
Hillsdale College
4.6 • 621 Ratings
🗓️ 13 August 2025
⏱️ 30 minutes
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Summary
On this episode of The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast, Jeremiah and Juan discuss the nature of executive power before introducing Dr. Ronald J. Pestritto.
In a republic, every citizen has a duty to understand their government. The Federalist is the greatest exposition of representative government and the institutional structure of the Constitution. It explains how the Constitution established a government strong enough to secure the rights of citizens and safe enough to wield that power. This course will examine how Publius understood human nature and good government, and why he argued that the only true safeguard of liberty lies in the vigilance of the American people.
The executive requires energy, efficiency, and dispatch to enforce the laws that are passed by the legislature.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I am Jeremiah Regan. |
| 0:13.4 | And I'm Juan Dabalos. We are back with the Federalist Lecture Number 9, The President. |
| 0:18.1 | There's an interesting argument in the Federalist, and Dr. Pastrido brings this out |
| 0:21.2 | nicely in the lecture. When you read Article 2 of the Constitution, the first word is the, |
| 0:26.4 | the executive power is vested in a president of the United States. And this is something that was |
| 0:32.7 | very clear at the time of the founding, and it's eroded a lot today, and we'll just sum it up in simple terms. |
| 0:38.7 | The president should be able to hire, sometimes with the advice and consent of the Senate, |
| 0:42.6 | depending on the office, should be able to hire people to help him, and should be able to fire |
| 0:46.8 | people that he thinks are inadequate for the job. The idea being he has to have control over his |
| 0:52.9 | branch of the government. |
| 0:57.8 | The people elected him, put him in charge of that branch. |
| 0:58.8 | Not the whole government. |
| 0:59.5 | He's not the king. |
| 1:02.1 | But he should have authority over his own branch. And the 20th and 21st century has seen a history of that power. |
| 1:06.3 | The president's ability to hire and fire within his own branch eroded dramatically. |
| 1:10.5 | Yeah, I've been encouraged by seeing a |
| 1:12.7 | resurgence in this understanding of the executive power nowadays. You know, you see people on TV |
| 1:19.5 | always talking about that the Department of Justice needs to be independent from the president. |
| 1:24.6 | And I always think to myself, under what branch of government is the Department |
| 1:28.5 | of Justice? If the Department of Justice is going to be independent from the president, that means |
| 1:33.0 | it's independent from the will of the American people. That's right. So you actually wanted to be |
| 1:38.3 | under the president. It is under the precedent. And the president is the one in whom, like you said, all of executive |
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