Americans have increasingly expanded presidential power over recent decades by expecting the president to provide solutions for all national problems, prosperity for all, and protection from harm. In this event, Gene Healy demonstrated how the president’s role needs to return to its properly defined constitutional limits, with its powers held in check by Congress and the courts.

Funding for this Event Provided by the John Templeton Foundation through a Gift from the Institute for Humane Studies

About the Speaker

Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute. His research interests include executive power and the role of the presidency as well as federalism and overcriminalization. He is the author of False Idol: Barack Obama and the Continuing Cult of the Presidency and The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power; and is editor of Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything.

Healy has appeared on PBS’s Newshour with Jim Lehrer and NPR’s Talk of the Nation, and his work has been published in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Legal Times, and elsewhere.

Healy holds a BA from Georgetown University and a JD from the University of Chicago Law School.