Here’s an abridged excerpt from page 26 of my former colleague’s excellent tome, The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power (Updated), which you should buy:

Where in the Constitution can such [purported presidential powers to set the rules, carry out the policy, and serve as sole reviewer of his own actions] be found? . . . Article II, outlining the powers of the president, begins simply: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” As then judge, now Justice Samuel Alito put it in a November 2000 speech before the Federalist Society, that language indicates that the president has “not just some executive power, but the executive power–the whole thing.”

Well, perhaps . . . First one has to establish that the constitutional text indicates a general grant of power to the executive–that the president’s powers go beyond those specifically enumerated in Sections 2 and 3 of Article II. Second, if “the executive Power” is a general grant of power, one still has to unpack what that power contains. What is “the whole thing”? Is it broad enough, as many unitarians suggest, to allow domestic surveillance and imprisonment without trial, so long as those activities are incident to the president’s wartime goals?

Is the vesting clause, namely, the first sentence of Article II, a general grant of “executive” power? If it is, then the enumeration of specific executive powers that follows in Article II, Sections 2 and 3, is largely redundant. If the president has the “whole thing,” whatever it is, surely it must be broad enough to include requiring “the Opinion, in writing,” of the heads of each executive department, or to allow him to “receive Ambassadors.”

Bottom line: if the men who wrote the Constitution thought the president should have Chuck Norris-level powers, they would have specified that in the text of the document, just as they specified Congress’s enumerated powers in Article I, Section 8. Let’s stop pretending that the President of the United States is a Hollywood action/thriller star, and start treating him like the just-a-man he is.