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Presidential power to recognize foreign nations and governments, exercised since the dawn of the republic, has never been viewed as exclusive. Indeed, Congress has enacted legislation that conferred recognition upon foreign countries. Recently, however, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, in Zivotofsky v. Secretary of State, asserted for the first time in American history an exclusive presidential power of recognition. This conclusion, built on a flawed historical record and faulty judicial premises stemming from United States v. Curtiss‐Wright Export Corp., exaggerates executive authority and ignores the largely ministerial role assigned to the president in receiving ambassadors and foreign ministers.

Lou Fisher's prolific writings on the war power—the constitutional repository of authority to initiate war and lesser military hostilities on behalf of the American people—have informed and, for the better part of four decades, shaped discussions and debates on the respective roles of Congress and the president, from the halls of academe to the corridors of power. Widely cited and invoked on hundreds of occasions by political scientists, historians, and legal academics, his work has opened doors for serious consideration of his views by representatives in all three branches of the federal government. It has, as well, established his place in the front-rank of constitutional scholars and, almost certainly, earned for his scholarship an enduring influence on discussions about the constitutional authority to order the use of military force.

Continued assertions of a presidential prerogative power, broad enough, in the literary tradition of the Lockean Prerogative to permit the president in an emergency to act in the absence or violation of law, raises anew the question of the existence, source, and scope of such extraordinary authority. This article explains that the framers of the Constitution delivered a constitutional and historical rebuke to the concept of executive prerogative. As Justice Jackson observed in the Steel Seizure Case, the framers recognized that the possession of an emergency power would "tend to kindle emergencies." Presidential violation of the Constitution is illegal, and can be made legal only through congressional passage of retroactive ratification.

Alexander Hamilton's writings, virtually alone among the framers, were invoked by President George W. Bush and his legal advisors as the cornerstone of the administration's assertions of sweeping executive powers in the areas of war and peace and national security. The Bush administration's conscription of Hamilton to justify its soaring claims of presidential power, however, represents a distortion and abuse of his views of the latter president's views, particularly those expressed in The Federalist Papers. With the loss of Hamilton as an intellectual pillar, President Bush's theory of a plenary executive power finds no support among the framers. Analysis of Hamilton's writings will repair his undeserved reputation as an apologist for expansive executive powers.

The Bush administration has advanced an expansive conception of the Commander‐in‐Chief Clause that has launched presidential power on a trajectory toward the realm of illimitable and unaccountable power, the nether world of American constitutionalism. President Bush would ascribe to the commander in chief powers that were never possessed by the president when the post was incorporated into the Constitution, and which may not be engrafted by a theory of a presidential revisory power. This essay contends that President Bush's claims, which find no foundation in the values, goals, and concerns that shaped the clause, represent a profound threat to constitutional government and republican values.

For many college students, enrollment in an introductory course on American government and politics will constitute their only detailed orientation to U.S. constitutional principles. What they read in introductory textbooks about presidential power will significantly inform and shape their understanding of the authority wielded by the nation's chief executive. How do introductory texts portray the president's constitutional powers? This essay argues that textbooks pay insufficient attention to the source and limits of presidential authority. Moreover, descriptions of executive powers are apt to leave students in a state of confusion. In view of all this, students as citizens are ill‐equipped to assess and evaluate sweeping assertions of executive power. As a consequence, it will be difficult for citizens to check presidential abuses of power.

President George W. Bush's unilateral termination of the 1972 ABM Treaty between the United States and Russia triggered a lawsuit, Kucinich v. Bush, in which members of the House of Representatives challenged the constitutionality of Bush's action on grounds that the president may not terminate a treaty without congressional approval. The Federal District Court refused to reach the merits of the case and dismissed the case as a nonjusticiable political question. The court's action reflects a disturbing tendency among lower court judges to elide substantive issues in foreign relations cases that challenge presidential usurpation of power. As a result, presidential aggrandizement of power remains unchecked.