From CGI member oldmaninthedesert:

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The Cult of The Presidency...Our Chief Magistrate and His Powers

Came across this book some time back,seems like a good time to go through it...

[....Unitary executive theory takes as its starting point the Constitution’s so-called vesting clause, Article II, Section 1, which declares that ‘‘the executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.’’23 The theory’s narrowest and most plausible claim is that the vesting clause gives the president the authority to dismiss subordinate officers within the executive branch. He can, for example, fire cabinet officers without asking the Senate for permission.24

Well before 9/11, however, many unitarians made more ambitious claims about the president’s powers in foreign affairs. They denounced the 1973 War Powers Resolution as an unconstitutional attempt to limit the president’s ability to engage in hostilities abroad and insisted that the Reagan administration had every right to secretly raise money for the Contras, despite a statute that clearly prohibited such activity.25

Though unitarians emphasize their doctrine’s Hamiltonian pedigree, it really emerged as a coherent body of thought during the Reagan years, as attorneys in the administration’s Office of Legal Counsel employed it to assert control over the federal bureaucracy and resist post-Watergate constraints on presidential power. The Right’s blossoming affection for the executive branch was a curious development. From the beginning of the modern conservative movement, with the founding of William F. Buckley’s National Review in 1955, conservatives had been the leading critics of expansive theories of presidential power, seeing them as schemes to empower activist liberalism.26 But by the time of Reagan’s ascendancy, a different view prevailed. As Steven Calabresi, one of the leading unitarians, and a special assistant to Reagan’s attorney general Edwin Meese, explained recently, ‘‘Conservatives who came of age in the ’70s and ’80s viewed the presidency as a friendly institution.’’27 A generation of conservative lawyers associated with the Federalist Society, which Calabresi helped found, has been raised unitarian, and many of them have gone on to positions within the executive branch and federal judiciary. [Calabresi still seeks his dictator,search him DC]....]

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2019/02/part-1-cult-of-presidencyour-chief.html