As a historical matter, my research shows that this claim is dead wrong. “The executive power” granted at the American founding was conceptually, legally, and semantically incapable of conveying a reservoir of royal authority. The real meaning of executive power was something almost embarrassingly simple: the power to execute the law. Overwhelming evidence for this point pervades both the Founders’ debates and the legal and political theory on which their discussions drew.
Listen to how Gouverneur Morris framed the problem for his fellow delegates in Philadelphia. The central challenge of constitutional governance, he said, was to safely distribute each of “the three powers” that everyone knew so well: “one … the power of making[,] another of executing, and a third of judging, the laws.” Under this tripartite system, the function of executive power was both straightforward and indispensable—to implement instructions issued by a valid exercise of legislative power. In a famous 1774 Election Day sermon, Gad Hitchcock stated the consequence plainly: “The executive power is strictly no other than the legislative carried forward, and of course, controllable by it.” These weren’t idiosyncratic views. The catechistic statement of three interlocking powers served as a universal grammar for debating constitutional governance. As one exasperated British reviewer said of the relentless trinitarianism in John Adams’s 1787 constitutional treatise, “Upon this point, like Lord Chesterfield with the Graces, Dr. Adams dwells for ever.”
And so the historical Constitution just wasn’t that complicated. It defined the president’s fundamental role as the servant of legislative will. It gave the president a conditional veto to check Congress’s exercise of that will in any particular case. And it vested a smattering of other authorities where Article II specifically said so. But that was it. The very “doctrine of prerogative” and such “other peculiar properties of the royal character,” one Virginia newspaper explained, were conceptually “incompatible with the view of these states when they are settling the form of a republican government.” The defining fact of the Constitution’s separation of powers was the structural minimalism of its presidency: Because the president’s powers were “so clearly defined,” a South Carolina Federalist concluded, they “never can be dangerous.”