Professor Sai Prakash is a noted legal scholar and prolific author who has long been one of the leading advocates of the unitary executive. See, e.g., Aditya Bamzai & Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash, The Executive Power of Removal, 136 Harv. L. Rev. 1756 (2023); Saikrishna Prakash, New Light on the Decision of 1789, 91 Cornell L. Rev. 1021 (2006); Steven G. Calabresi & Saikrishna B. Prakash, The President’s Power to Execute the Laws, 104 Yale L.J. 541 (1994). More recently, he has warned of the dangers posed to our constitutional system by the growth of executive power and a culture of presidential lawlessness. See Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash, The Fearless Executive, Crime, and the Separation of Powers, 111 Va. L. Rev. 1 (2025); Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash, The Living Presidency: An Originalist Argument Against its Ever-Expanding Powers (2020); Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash, Imperial from the Beginning: The Constitution of the Original Executive (2015). Unaccountably, Professor Prakash professes to see no tension or inconsistency between these two positions. See Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash, Too Unitary, 135 Yale L. J. F. 533 (Feb. 9, 2026).
When people speak of the unitary executive, they usually mean first and foremost the proposition that the president enjoys a constitutionally illimitable power to remove a broad swathe of executive officers. It is the existence and scope of this power which has been the primary focus of debates among constitutional scholars, judges, and statesmen over the last 237 years, and it is this power which the Supreme Court recently expanded in Trump v. Slaughter, 606 U.S. __ (June 29, 2026), where it held the president could remove without cause commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and other “independent” agencies. It is important to recognize, though, that this removal power is only one aspect of a broader, but far less scrutinized, question of the president’s right to direct and control executive officers.
It is also important to distinguish between the question of constitutionality and the actual consequences of the unitary executive in the real world. One could believe that the Constitution, correctly interpreted, mandates the unitary executive in its strongest form, while at the same time acknowledging that it contributes to the dangerous constitutional imbalance Prakash has identified. This, however, is not Prakash’s position. Instead, he maintains that the unitary executive, if “[p]roperly conceived and understood,” is “scarcely terrifying” and “has little bark or bite.” Too Unitary, 135 Yale L.J.F. at 536. To put it bluntly, this is nuts.
Continue reading “The Unitary Executive (Part I): Prakash v. Prakash”