A column by the Times's resident conservative, Ross Douthat, on Barr:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/19/opin ... e=Homepage
"If these and other issues complicate the thesis of Barr’s Notre Dame address, a similar accounting of trends in presidential power makes the thesis of his Federalist Society speech look totally implausible. Again, his theme is reassurance: reassuring legal conservatism that its Reagan-era vision of an executive unduly constrained by an overreaching Congress still applies to the presidency of 2019.
But it obviously, obviously doesn’t. The presidency and its powers were, indeed, weakened substantially in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, which is part of why conservatism at the time reasonably sought their reassertion. But since Reagan and especially since 9/11 there has been a dramatic re-expansion of the imperial presidency, with a successful consolidation of sweeping presidential powers over war making and a more contested attempt to claim new powers over domestic policy — both of which have advanced under Democratic and Republican presidents alike.
Barr does acknowledge, because he must, the increasing abdication of Congress from its policymaking duties. But he claims that the legislature has nonetheless expanded its power over the executive, by replacing policymaking with an “abuse of the advice-and-consent process” that holds up and harasses and sometimes rejects many presidential nominees.
But the change in the advice-and-consent process reflects the weakness of Congress, not its overweening, presidency-constraining strength. An imperial presidency, by its nature, raises the stakes for presidential nominations and appointments: The fact that the president can go to war without congressional authority makes Defense and State Department nominations more fraught; the fact that presidents are constantly pushing the envelope on immigration policy or health care regulations turns Health and Human Services and Department of Homeland Security nominations into a battlefield. But all of this is happening because the presidency is more powerful than ever, leaving the people’s branch reduced to fighting over which viziers our czar gets to empower or have whispering in his ear.
Barr is probably right that the Trump presidency has been weaker than its immediate predecessors, more constrained and hamstrung and impeded; he’s certainly right that Trump has had unusual difficulties in getting nominations through. But this weakness reflects his boss’s extraordinary incompetence at least as much as it reflects the machinations of the Resistance — though, of course, this isn’t something Trump’s attorney general can be exactly expected to admit.
He should be expected, however, to accurately describe the general drift of law and politics and culture, rather than soothingly telling audiences that little has changed since 1980 and that, Trump notwithstanding, the contours of conservative ideology can remain substantially intact.
There are two ways to read Barr’s inaccurate-but-ideologically-reassuring portraits of our politics — these twin attempts, as Damon Linker puts it, to achieve the “full assimilation” of the Trump presidency into “the conservative movement and the story it tells itself” about the world. One, which Linker partially endorses, is more alarmist: If conservatives believe that even today’s presidency is much too constrained and that secular elites can be blamed for all our problems, then we should fear an authoritarian cascade on the right, and expect a post-Trump quest for an American Constantine who can restore the presidency and the one true faith alike.
The other, which I’m drawn to by my own obsession with decadence, would emphasize futility instead. A conservatism that constantly reconverts itself to the worldview of the Reagan era isn’t poised to claim sweeping, authoritarian power, in the service of religious revolution or any other cause. It’s poised for repetition, gridlock and failure — ever-imagining itself seizing the initiative, but really letting itself be carried backward, a boat against the current, into the world of Bill Barr’s youth and past."