Unsanctioned executive power, if it exists, knows no legal limits

Evidence

In view of the ease, expedition and safety with which Congress can grant and has granted large emergency powers, certainly ample to embrace this crisis, I am quite unimpressed with the argument that we should affirm possession of them without statute. Such power either has no beginning or it has no end. If it exists, it need submit to no legal restraint. I am not alarmed that it would plunge us straightway into dictatorship, but it is at least a step in that wrong direction. — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process, 2863

Categorization

• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source
• XREF: connects to: Presidential authority varies in strength across three zones defined by congressional disjunction — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 2851; A gap separates the President’s formal paper powers from his real accumulated powers — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 2865; President Truman sought to execute congressionally prescribed policy, disputing Black’s framing — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 2934 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Unlawful power is real, not a mere negatable possibility #expands (0.87)
• Unprecedented power cannot be constrained by law made before it exists #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1637
• Free government requires that the executive act only under law made by parliamentary deliberation #contradicts (0.85) — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process, 2872
• Executive discretion beyond statute is justified by law’s unavoidable incompleteness #qualifies (0.82) — John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 197
• Political liberty means rule by law, not unchecked individual license #contradicts (0.82) — John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 30
• Mystified arbitrary power becomes immune to legal restraint #expands (0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 628
• Narrow concepts of legal validity fail to prevent official abuse of power #corroborates (0.78) — HLA Hart, The Concept of Law (Clarendon Law…, 502