“Compared to what?” is a Borscht Belt punchline that is especially relevant to presidential studies in these times. By contrast with the 45th president, any previous chief executive would come across as a model of statesmanship. For the purposes of political science, however, a higher standard is in order. Louis Fisher, a preeminent scholar of constitutional issues, applies such a standard in this excellent study of the Obama administration.

During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama often mentioned that he had taught constitutional law, and he chastised George W. Bush for executive overreach. Many observers hoped that his election would restore regular order and presidential restraint. As Fisher explains, however, Obama’s performance fell short of these hopes. He did not commit impeachable offenses or launch massive new wars, but neither did he jettison much of the power that had built up in the White House.

Fisher begins by describing how the presidency evolved beyond what the Founders intended. Right from the start, they recognized one potential threat to the constitutional balance. As Alexander Hamilton put it in Federalist 8: “It is of the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of the legislative authority.” Whether this point was particularly troubling to Hamilton, who argued endlessly for increased “energy” in the executive, is debatable. Nevertheless, James Madison, the “father” of the Constitution, came to be increasingly troubled by executive overreach in responses to foreign crises, as is evident in his response to the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Until the middle of the twentieth century, military action sporadically had the effect of augmenting presidential power, but the problem became chronic as World War II gave way to the Cold War, which in turn gave way to conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Through active approval or passive acceptance, Fisher contends, the legislative branch let the executive branch slip the surly bonds of our fundamental law: “It is accurate to say that from Truman to the present time Presidents have engaged the country repeatedly in unconstitutional wars” (p. 22). Fisher includes President Obama’s 2011 decision to intervene in Libya, arguing that “the use of military force against another country that has not threatened the United States is, as former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has said, ‘an act of war’” (p. 215).

Fisher writes that assertive presidents have found enablers in the judiciary and the academic world. He points to Justice George Sutherland’s famous majority opinion in U.S. v. Curtiss-Wright (299 U.S. 304 (1936)), which spoke of the president’s status as the “sole organ” of foreign policy, including “unfettered discretion.” Sutherland, Fisher says, based this opinion not on the text of the Constitution but on a gross distortion of a speech that John Marshall gave in 1800. Nevertheless, the decision influenced law and policy for decades to come. In midcentury, Fisher adds, historians and political scientists backed up the argument for a stronger chief executive: “From the 1940s through the 1960s, a number of presidential scholars advanced their professional careers by arguing that it was politically necessary and constitutionally permissible to transfer ever greater power to the President” (p. 7). The trend of scholarly opinion changed with the Vietnam War and Watergate, but by that time, the “Imperial Presidency” had achieved daunting dimensions.

The growth of presidential power has often taken the form of independent executive actions. Presidents have been issuing executive orders, memoranda, and similar documents since the early days of the republic, with George Washington’s Neutrality Proclamation setting an important precedent. Since World War II, Fisher writes, presidents have increasingly bypassed the legislative process to make public policy through such unilateral actions. Some of these measures, such as executive orders to advance Civil Rights, have understandably met with widespread support. Others have been controversial, with critics condemning them as efforts to subvert the constitutional separation of powers. A good deal of that controversy has revolved around signing statements, in which presidents affix their names to legislation while expressing views about the constitutionality and enforceability of various provisions. As a senator, Barack Obama attacked President George W. Bush for abusing signing statements. As a president, Fisher says, Obama followed his predecessors in pushing the boundaries. Signing a bill on national defense, he suggested that he might disregard purportedly unconstitutional restrictions on the transfer of detainees. “Under this interpretation,” writes Fisher, “the law is not what appears in a signed bill but what the administration decided to do later on” (p. 81).

Unilateral action has its limits. President Obama sought to prevent the deportation of undocumented immigrants who are parents of citizens or permanent residents. This policy never materialized because a federal judge issued an injunction, saying that the policy raised issues under the Take Care Clause and the Administrative Procedure Act. The administration argued in court that it was merely an exercise of prosecutorial discretion, not a breach of constitutional authority. But as the judge noticed, President Obama himself had said that because Congress had failed to act on immigration, “I just took action to change the law” (p. 137). Eventually, an evenly divided Supreme Court left the lower court judgment in place. In 2017, the next administration’s Homeland Security secretary rescinded the program.

Executive actions do not have the formal staying power of statutes: What one president does by the stroke of a pen, the next president can undo by another stroke of the pen—at least in principle. In practice, it is not so easy. After this book went to press, a federal judge thwarted the Trump administration’s efforts to end protections for “Dreamers.” Citing the same Administrative Procedure Act that frustrated President Obama’s efforts for parents, the court ruled that the Trump administration must fully restore the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

This is that rare academic work that could have been even better if it had been longer. It does mention ways in which Congress has deliberately expanded presidential power, but it could have gone into greater detail on this point. Take trade policy. Although the Constitution explicitly vests Congress with authority over taxation and international trade, lawmakers have passed statutes giving presidents considerable latitude to raise and lower tariffs. Despite his rhetorical commitment to free trade, President Obama exercised this power, setting the stage for far more draconian tariffs under his successor.

The very useful chapter on executive claims to secrecy might have been stronger with additional discussion of the Obama administration’s fraught record. The Justice Department probed leaks by subpoenaing the telephone records of Associated Press journalists. It surveilled James Rosen of Fox News and named him as a “co-conspirator” in a leak about North Korea’s nuclear program. And in another leak investigation, James Risen of the New York Times spent years fighting administration efforts to make him give up a confidential source. Some journalists called it the least transparent administration in their memory—until the next one made this notion seem quaint.

President Obama concludes with a well-justified call to restore the regular legislative process. Here too, further development would have been helpful. In recent decades, Congress has weakened its own capacity for deliberation and oversight, shifting its staff resources from research, investigation, and policy analysis to “messaging” and public relations. As Fisher argues, too much power has shifted to one end of Pennsylvania Avenue—but much of the blame lies at the other end.