Constitution Breakdown #5: Dr. Tom Frieden

This is the 99% Invisible Breakdown of the Constitution. I'm Roman Mars. And I'm Elizabeth Joe. Today, we are finishing up our discussion of article two, which establishes the executive branch of the federal government. Our special guest for this episode is doctor Tom Frieden, who served as director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention under president Obama from 2009 to 2017. We brought him on to talk about the experience of being a highly trained expert in an inherently political institution That was once considered to be about as apolitical as you could get, but not so much anymore. Doctor. Frieden was also the New York City public health commissioner under Mayor Bloomberg from 2002 to 2009, and he talks about the difference between running a city health agency and a federal health agency. Which one had the most power might surprise you. But first, Elizabeth is gonna take us through article two, section by section. We covered article one before that was addressing Congress, its powers, and limitations. Now let's take a brief tour of article two. Okay. Okay? Alright. So article two can be seen as doing a couple of things, specifying the selection of the president and the function of the executive branch, listing the specific powers of the president, listing the duties of the president, and what to do with a constitutionally inadequate president. Mhmm. Okay. So there are some, just like with article one, some very important aspects of the executive branch that are in article two, but some things that are not in article two at all, but nevertheless important. So we'll get to those. Okay. But I think the big thing, unlike our discussion about Congress, is that with article two, a huge force affecting article two is Trump and the Supreme Court's treatment of Trump. Trump has had a very significant impact on how we think about the powers of the presidency. So let's start with section one. Section one contains the vesting clause, which says the executive power shall be vested in a president of The United States Of America. Now, we saw a vesting clause in article one as well, but article one and article two have a notable difference. Article one says, all legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a congress. Article two doesn't refer to just powers here in granted. Now you could say, well, maybe that was just a lapse on the part of the drafters, but maybe not because that suggests there's some ambiguity as to whether the powers in article two are just examples, or are they the only powers the president has? Wow. Now the spoiler, of course, is that every president has said, no. We have more. We have more than what's in article two. Right? Yeah. And practically speaking, we've treated presidents as having some more power than what's specifically laid out in article two, but, of course, the contested part is always how much power. So …