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This chapter discusses research on the economic, political, and historical aspects of implicit motives. The integrated running manual for scoring implicit motives is cited as a methodological tool in such studies. Implicit motives affect how people construe their social roles, as well as the satisfactions and vulnerabilities they derive from these roles. Implicit achievement motivation predicts improved entrepreneurial performance among individuals and for firms; however, it is often associated with frustration and failure in politics. The implicit power motive predicts successful political leadership, but is also associated with aggression and the escalation of crises to war. The chapter discusses the problem of taming power motivation and motivational aspects of globalization and climate change.

This chapter discusses the power of the president over offices and its appointed officers, and their function as part of the executive. While the U.S Constitution states that the Congress shall have the discretion to create offices and determine the salaries and responsibilities of the appointed officers, the president has the authority to nominate and appoint an executive officer in an office with the counsel and consent of the Senate. The president can direct these officers' execution of the law and their actions related to foreign relations and defense. He also has the power to dismiss the officers at will. Once in office, executive officers should relieve the president of the burden of executive details and help exercise presidential powers. Without subordinates, the executive power is feckless and cannot possibly serve as an active force, since so few aspects of executive power can be exercised without the aid of others.

This chapter discusses the president's power as commander in chief. The president may command the military as commander in chief. However, he has no constitutionally protected sphere of autonomy; rather, the Congress has almost complete authority over war and military matters. Only the Congress has the power to decide whether the nation will declare war. It also has control over the regulation of the armed forces and the system of military discipline. But even if the Congress tries to micromanage the military, the president has many ways to restrain its meddling. The chief executive may supersede whatever military discretion that the Congress chooses not to exercise. He may also delay or veto bills that regulate the military, nominate his military subordinates, and dismiss them at will.

This chapter enumerates the important powers that the president does not possess. The president lacks authoritative crisis power, such as suspending habeas corpus or imposing martial law, to take whatever measures deemed necessary in emergencies. Neither does the president have constitutional privileges and immunities to protect the executive branch, making it subject to judicial process. The lack of constitutional privilege also implies that the chief executive can even be prosecuted while in office. However, the U.S. Constitution permits Congress to ameliorate problems arising from the absence of executive privileges and immunities through the passing of statutes that may grant the chief executive emergency power, and presidential immunity.

This chapter discusses the extent to which the president can regulate the power of the Congress. The president has a duty to execute the laws legislated by the Congress. This responsibility has led some to regard the chief executive as something of a constitutionally established servant or page of Congress. However, the president's powers allow the president to shape the laws committed to the office's execution. The president can share information with the Congress and opine about the shortcomings of existing law, and also has a qualified veto power over legislation, giving great influence over the content of new laws. The president's role in the formation, alteration, and execution of legislation also gives rise to the complaint that the president would wield both legislative and executive power.

This chapter describes the scant control Madisonian institutions actually exercise over national security matters. Judges are beholden to the Trumanites and normally dismiss challenges to Trumanite policies without reaching the merits, and even when they do, the Trumanites almost always win (as in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISC). Members of Congress are responsive to constituencies that exhibit little organized concern about secret security policies, leading members to defer to Trumanite threat assessments, neglect oversight, or overtly join forces with the Trumanite network. The President is more presider than decider, having been boxed in by Trumanites who dominate a bottom-up decision-making process and who present nominal policy options. NSA surveillance is a case in point, demonstrating the symbiotic relationship between the Trumanites and Madisonians, the Trumanites’ role as policy authors, presidential complaisance, judicial subservience, and congressional indifference.

This chapter examines Section 313 of the Fourth Restatement of the Foreign Relations Law, regarding “Authority to Suspend, Terminate, or Withdraw from Treaties.” That provision states that “according to established practice, the president has the authority to act on behalf of the United States in suspending or terminating U.S. treaty commitments and in withdrawing the United States from treaties.” While the reporters cautioned that this section currently applies only to Article II treaties, one of them recently wrote that “if presidents do have the legal authority to withdraw from Article II treaties, it is not clear why that authority would not extend to congressional-executive agreements” and presumably, other agreements as well. Donald Trump’s tumultuous presidency has called this broad supposition into question. Since 2017, the Trump administration has announced its withdrawal from a host of bilateral and multilateral arrangements. One could easily imagine this president and his lawyers misconstruing Section 313 as justifying a general power of the president to terminate, suspend, or withdraw from any and all international agreements to which the United States is a party. The chapter argues that no such power exists. The U.S. Constitution does not confer upon the president a general unilateral power of treaty termination. Nor can such a general unilateral power be derived from constitutional text, structure, or U.S. Supreme Court precedent.

This chapter discusses the president's constitutional duty to “preserve, protect, and defend” the U.S. Constitution. The Presidential Oath not only forbids presidential violation of the Constitution but also imposes a duty of action. The president should strive to ensure that neither he nor his administration violates its provisions. He must defend the Constitution against the violations of others by vetoing unconstitutional congressional legislation, and declining to reinforce unconstitutional federal statutes. He must also criticize the judiciary's constitutional misconstructions, and hinder and obstruct the states' and private parties' unconstitutional designs and measures. However, the president lacks the ability to impede unconstitutional legislation since the Constitution does not grant the president all the resources that might be useful for defending it.

This chapter clarifies certain aspects of executive power in the U.S. Constitution. A reading of Article II, Sections 2 and 3 suggests the president has little or no foreign affairs authority, except for receiving ambassadors and making treaties. It also implies that the presidnt has no authority over civilian executives, except for the ability to demand written opinions from department heads on matters within their statutory purview. However, the article's unitary executive can be considered as elective monarch since it states that the president can pardon crimes, veto bills, appoint officers, control the military, and be re-elected by his electoral-college. The chapter concludes that no one can predict the presidency's future direction, except to say that there will be further drift, sometimes making the presidency more regal and other times less so.

This chapter discusses the president's implicit duty to execute judicial judgments, and describes the relationship between the executive and the judicial branch. The president must implement court judgments, even when viewing them as erroneous. The president's duty to execute judgments means not only that the president must honor judgments against the government, but the president must also execute judgments awarded in suits in which the government is not a party. The judiciary must be kept as isolated as possible from the executive because of the notion of separation of powers. However, the U.S. Constitution has never forbidden judges from serving in the executive branch or from offering advice to the president. Some federal judges have served as executive officers, negotiating treaties, or advising the executive.

This chapter focuses on the treaty-making process set forth in Article II of the U.S. Constitution, which requires that presidents obtain the advice and consent of two-thirds of the Senate. Some scholars contend that, under modern law and practice, presidents can choose to conclude any international agreement by obtaining either ex ante authorization or ex post approval from a majority of Congress rather than obtaining the supermajority “advice and consent” of the Senate. If presidents in fact have this freedom of choice, there appears to be a puzzle: Why do they ever choose to use the Article II treaty process, which is more politically difficult than the executive agreement processes? To be sure, the use of the Article II process has been in decline, but the process is still used for some agreements, including in situations in which the process seems to make it more difficult for presidents to obtain approval of agreements that they support. A common answer to this puzzle is based on signaling theory: Using the Article II process, it is said, allows the president or the country to signal valuable information to potential treaty partners. This chapter argues that the signaling explanation is questionable and suggests that domestic legal and political factors better explain the continued use of the Article II process.

This chapter examines the global popularity of Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth U.S. president. It analyzes the routes that Lincoln's name and reputation traveled and what Lincoln's celebrity can tell us about transnational political, economic, and cultural networks. It highlights the importance of Lincoln's reputation as a self-made man, his humanitarianism, humility, moral code, and religion revealed by the reputation as the emancipator and the lack of sustained and bare-knuckled foreign critiques of Lincoln.