David French

Yeah, I think it's changing with more presidential control over a diminished executive branch.

So if you look at the totality of Supreme Court authority, and this could—this take, I fully acknowledge, could age very poorly depending on how the Tariff case comes out, how the Lisa Cook case comes out, how the— You don't have to worry too much about that, right?

But by June, by the end of June, we'll know a whole lot more.

So that's when the Supreme Court issues all the opinions for this term.

But here's the way I would phrase it.

What the unitary executive theory says is the president has control over the executive branch.

However, the original separation of powers conception would say that the president doesn't have control over Congress.

And there's even limits as to what Congress can delegate to the president.

And so, for example, tariffs, that is a enumerated Article I authority of Congress.

Can Congress just delegate that to the president without using even those explicit terms to grant worldwide tariff taxing authority?

I think the answer to that is gonna be no.

Similarly, when you're talking about the Fed, the court has determined so far, at least in dicta, that the Fed is different from the SEC and the FTC.

And in that circumstance, the president doesn't have that unfettered authority.

Birthright citizenship, you have an actual constitutional provision and a statutory provision enacting birthright citizenship as we understand it.

I think they're gonna find that the president doesn't have the unilateral ability to change all that by executive decree.

So I would say that the sort of originalist conception in which a majority of the majority is operating under is that the president, yes, should have more control over the executive branch

However, the executive branch should have less control over the American government.

And I think that that is where they're heading.

And so what that will mean is Trump is gonna, at the end of the day, have more ability to hire and fire, say, the head of any given agency or independent agency other than the Fed, but those agencies are gonna have less power to do what Trump wants them to do.

Now, I think that's gonna be the ultimate resolution by June 30th of 2026 of this year.