Quote
By William Howard Taft
The true view of the Executive functions is, as I conceive it, that the President can exercise no power which cannot be fairly and reasonably traced to some specific grant of power or justly implied and included within such express grant as proper and necessary to its exercise.
- Source
- Our Chief Magistrate and His Powers, 1916 · pp. 139-140
- Read at
- Internet Archive (University of Toronto scan of the 1916 first edition, New York: Columbia University Press)
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From Our Chief Magistrate and His Powers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1916). Taft sets out his limited view of presidential power, in contrast to the view that a president may do anything the public interest seems to need. The next sentences say the grant must be in the Constitution or an act of Congress, and that there is "no undefined residuum of power."