Mazzone on The Unitary Executive and the Decisions of 1789 and 1861

Jason Mazzone, Univesity of Illinois College of Law, has published The Unitary Executive and the Decisions of 1789 and 1861 at 59 UC Davis Law Review Online 313 (2026). Here is the abstract.

Debates over the constitutional power of the President to remove executive officers are almost as old as the Republic itself. These debates continue today in the academic literature — with a vast body of writing on the constitutional basis (if any) for a presidential removal power, its scope, and the authority (if any) of Congress to regulate the power — and at the Supreme Court, which has decided a series of removal cases in recent years, and which has some removal cases on its current docket. Virtually every discussion (regardless of the conclusion reached) of the power of the President to remove executive officers invokes the so-called Decision of 1789. This Essay does also. But it focuses additionally on another important decision: that of 1861. In that year, the states that had seceded from the Union adopted their own permanent constitution. The Constitution of the Confederate States mimicked and repeated (with modifications) many of the provisions of the federal Constitution. It also included something the federal Constitution had not: a specific provision specifying the scope of the powers of the President to remove executive officers. Unusual though it might seem to turn for guidance to the Confederate Constitution — a charter written and ratified by traitors — the exercise has some payoff. It helps us identify some possible conceptions of presidential removal authority (under the federal Constitution) and to assess the relative merits of alternatives.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.