Law Commons^™

Partisan Conflicts Over Presidential Authority, Jide Okechuku Nzelibe

Faculty Working Papers

A prevailing view in the legal and political science literature assumes that power holders seek to expand or contract their constitutional authority based on incentives that are intrinsic to the logic of the institutional offices they occupy. For instance, it is generally assumed that Presidents are empire builders who will almost always prefer maximum flexibility in shaping their policy objectives, whereas members of Congress may sometimes shirk their institutional prerogatives because of electoral incentives or collective action problems. A similar institutional logic underpins the view that federal courts will often seek to expand their interpretive authority in constitutional controversies at …