The Importance of the President's Constitutional Authority

The strength of these norms accelerated considerably after Watergate. There ought to be a concern that there's even a debate in some sense about whether these norms serve the important purposes that they do. I can't imagine a White House counsel ever telling a president that it was fine for him to issue an order to the department for the express and fundamentally exclusive purpose of protecting himself or a close political association from political liability, irrespectively the merits. And so I think this is a pivotal moment for these issues to be taken on, head on, and resolved.