Precedent and the Growth of Presidential Authority

Presidential power rarely shrinks. It accumulates. When one administration stretches authority and the other branches tolerate it, the next administration inherits the new boundary as “normal,” then pushes past it. Over time, constitutional restraints weaken less through one dramatic rupture than through routine acceptance.

The warning isn’t that the government collapses overnight. It’s that the country gets used to executive excess—executive power expanding, Congress avoiding confrontation, and courts often giving the presidency wider room to operate. The result is an imbalance that becomes harder to correct, especially when partisanship makes oversight optional.

This escalation works through precedent and example. Law-enforcement pressure on the press, aggressive foreign-policy moves, threats against allies, and domestic force options—treated as part of the same political weather rather than as boundary-crossing events that force a reset. That’s how normalization happens: not one action, but many, and the public learns to treat them as ordinary.

A key point is that rights can end up depending on presidential choice rather than stable limits.

How about when in 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt used executive power to incarcerate Japanese Americans without due process, upheld by the Supreme Court or in 2012 Barack Obama used executive action to temporarily protect certain undocumented people who came to the U.S. as children (DACA). The point isn’t that these cases are morally equivalent. It’s that the mechanism is the same: major life outcomes and access to constitutional protections can hinge on what a president decides to do.

Bush-era national security is a clear bridge in the “powers expand and stick” pattern of American government. After 9/11, Congress passed the 2001 AUMF, authorizing the president to use “necessary and appropriate force” against those he determines were responsible—language that has been interpreted broadly over time. The “USA PATRIOT Act” also expanded surveillance and investigative authorities, shifting the baseline for what the executive branch could do in the name of security.

That is the pattern: presidents quickly learn what they *can* do, and far less often internalize what they *shouldn’t* do—especially when the political system rewards action and rarely imposes real costs for overreach. Each accommodation signals that limits are negotiable; each new administration starts from the last administration’s high-water mark.

And that’s the final risk: somewhere right now, a young man watches Trump and thinks, *I can take it further.*