Faculty at Home Lecture Series: The Founders’ Views and the State of the Office and its Powers Today

Please join Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science Murray Dry for a talk entitled “The Presidency and the Constitution: The Founders’ Views and the State of the Office and its Powers Today.” Talk Description: This talk takes its points of departure from two books on the American presidency that were published in 2020. The first is “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency”, by Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith. The authors provided a roadmap for reform of the presidency in the post-Trump era. The book was written in 2020; the authors did not consider that Donald Trump, who has steadfastly denied his defeat in 2020, would be running for re-election in 2024 while under indictment in three different jurisdictions. The indictment handed down on August 1, 2023, charged the former president with a conspiracy to subvert legitimate election results. The other book, “The President Who Would Not Be King”, by Michael McConnell, addresses the relationship between the framers’ construction of the office and powers of the president and its current condition, in political and legal terms. Drawing on these two books, the indictments, and other materials, I will describe the relationship between the founders’ Constitution and the American Constitution today.

For more information and to register please visit the Faculty at Home website.