ABSTRACT

The fight over the removal power has been central to the development of the American presidency from the earliest days of the republic. Although the removal power provoked a historic constitutional debate in the first Congress, removals from office were not a high priority for the nation's first president. Jackson's critics strongly condemned the president's removal policy as an abuse of power and a violation of the spirit of the Constitution. The unitary executive was an attempt to revive the sweeping constitutional theory that Taft had introduced in Myers. Although the intellectual origins of the unitary executive can be traced to Myers, the political crucible for the theory was the Reagan presidency. Attitudes in the country toward party patronage were gradually becoming more skeptical of the Jacksonian orthodoxy about the virtues of rotation in office. Civil service reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had succeeded in dramatically curtailing party patronage in the federal bureaucracy.