What Powers are Inherently Executive?

Using two cases from Franklin Roosevelt's administration - United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp. (1936) and Korematsu v. United States (1944) - this episode explores a fundamental constitutional question: what is executive power? Justice Sutherland's opinion in Curtiss-Wright offers a high-level civics lesson on the constitutional difference between the enumerated powers of the government in domestic affairs and the largely unenumerated powers of the president in foreign affairs. The case of Korematsu, about the detainment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II, however, blurs the line between domestic affairs, on the one hand, and foreign affairs, on the other, and challenges us to think about the constitutional limits of executive power.