At Flagler Tiger Bay, Ex-US Attorney General Gives Bullish View of ‘Unitary’ Executive Power, With Nod to Calvin Coolidge

It isn’t often in 2025 that you hear the name of Calvin Coolidge in Flagler County, or anywhere, not just because he was nicknamed “the silent” or reigned a century ago with more distrust and contempt than affection for people. Even less often than you’d hear the 30th president and the set-up man to the Great Depression described, without irony, as “my favorite president of all time.” 

Jesse Panuccio pulled off both feats as the featured speaker at Flagler Tiger Bay’s May 21 lunch. Panuccio was the former executive director of the Florida Department of Executive Opportunity and general counsel to former Gov. Rick Scott. He made his national mark while twice serving as acting U.S. Attorney General briefly in 2017, and again from 2018 to 2019, for a president who apparently was not his favorite of all time.

Panuccio focused on the record spate of recent presidential executive orders and “their legal status,” as he put it. His talk before the latest of series of sell-out crowds at Tiger Bay drew from headlines about the most aggressive use of executive power since the Civil War in combination with Panuccio’s interpretation of history in the founding era to endorse the current president’s conduct as legally justified. But he never explained his affection for the dour Coolidge, about whom Dorothy Parker joked, when he died, “How could they tell?”

Panuccio enumerated the number of executive orders previous presidents signed, without detailing their purpose. Coolidge signed 1,203 of them, the first four having to do with mourning Warren Harding, several designating who could sign in his name (he was as famously hands-off as Ronald Reagan), and most falling somewhere between routine and beneath the executive’s job: July 14, 1926: “Retirement of Henry H. Morgan, Foreign Service Officer, Class 1, Ordered Effective July 31, 1926.” 

Executive orders aside, Coolidge’s signature was also on some of he nation’s most racist laws since the Civil War, including the Immigration Act of 1924, which banned Asian immigrants and severely restricted immigration from what one of his successors and current occupant of the White House calls “shithole countries.” It was an odd paradox for Coolidge, who was also a stalwart of racial equality. His October 2025 speech to the American Legion is one of the country’s most noble statements in defense of diversity decades before the term’s currency, and with certain lines–“We shall have to look beyond the outward manifestations of race and creed”– anticipated Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of the day when Americans would not be “judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Coolidge’s view of executive power was closer to Jefferson’s than to Hamilton’s, while Coolidge’s policies were closer to Reagan’s than to those of the current president. Reagan on taking office had ordered Harry Truman’s portrait in the Cabinet Room replaced with Coolidge’s, whose supply-side economics presaged Reagan’s with equally dire consequences for the budget and the economy. 

Woodrow Wilson had signed 1,803 executive orders and Franklin Roosevelt, who died in his fourth term, signed 3,211. In comparison, the current president has signed only 372 between his first term and his second so far, though no president in history had signed as many as he had in his first 100 days (142; next-closest was FDR at 99. All the presidents combined, up to Abraham Lincoln, signed 133 between them.) 

Panuccio’s theme was not so much the legality of executive orders but the authority of the executive. He had prefaced his talk by giving a plug to Alexander Hamilton’s justification for a “unitary” executive in one of the Federalist Papers (“energy in the executive is a leading characteristic in the definition of good government,” Hamilton wrote in Federalist 70).

“So Hamilton and the founding generation,” Panuccio said, “believed in a strong executive, believed in what they said was energy in the executive. In other words, the presidency has always had an outsized role in American government, and the founders envisioned a strong executive in both conducting foreign affairs and administering the domestic laws of our country.”

Not quite. It was not Hamilton and the founding generation, a clever conflation sharply belied by the era’s documents, but chiefly Hamilton who’d believed in a strong executive. Most of his fellow founders mistrusted executive power, the memory of King George being as fresh then as, say, the Jan. 6 insurrection is for Americans today. 

Panuccio never mentioned James Madison, whose Federalist contributions set out a far more limited role for the executive, whom he distrusted. He did not, for example, quote Madison’s Federalist 47, where he wrote: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands,  whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” 

Nor did the Harvard-trained attorney note that Madison’s influence on the Constitution (he is considered the father of the Bill of Rights) was significantly greater than Hamilton’s, or that Jefferson, who shared Madison’s mania for limited government and disliked Hamilton, controlled the presidency for 16 years, long after Hamilton bled to death in Weehawken, N.J., after his temper and Aaron Burr got the better of him. 

So Panuccio’s claim that “the presidency has always had an outsized role in American government” is not as accurate as his later explanation that “executive power has increased steadily throughout the 20th century and into the 21st Century.” The “unitary” version of the executive never made it into the Constitution. It did not exist in 1789, though it has been fitfully conjured since Nixon and more especially since George W. Bush and the last president, at the urging of the odd law review article and right-wing think tanks. (Panuccio’s version of executive power echoes the sections on a unitary executive in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a largely successful blueprint for the current president’s agenda.)

Panuccio was pulling off the sort of cherry-picking of the Federalist Papers that, as with scriptures, enables its readers to find close to any interpretation of American power they wish: it’s part of the Federalist’s enduring wealth.

“Our current president has certainly taken these words to heart,” Panuccio said, referring to Hamilton’s, though there is no record of the current president having read the Federalist or much of American history. “I think he can be characterized as energetic.” Panuccio described the issuing of executive orders as reflecting that energy and as a means of shaping policy, along with several other instruments, whether executive memos or proclamations. 

“All of these forms of action are seen as inherent in being an executive,” he said. “This is how you direct the branch and announce your policy.” He then noted the flip side: “Executive orders are much less permanent than a statute, much less stable than legislation. They can be and often are summarily revoked or modified by a subsequent president. For example, when President Biden took office in his first week, he issued about three dozen executive orders, most of which reversed executive orders or executive actions that President Trump had taken his first term, and when President Trump, now President 47, came into a second term, within hours of taking the oath of office this time around, he rescinded 78 of President Biden’s executive orders.”

With a record number of executive orders in the first few months of the current administration came a record number of court challenges: 250 so far, and counting, with a few websites devoted to tracking the cases. Panuccio quickly surveyed the current administration’s orders relating to three categories–immigration, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, and “cultural issues” such as DEI–diversity, equity and inclusion. 

He focused especially on one executive order targeting birthright citizenship and another targeting Tren de Aragua, or TdA, the Venezuelan gang. To justify deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, the president is claiming, without evidence, that TdA has “invaded” the United States. 

“The citizenship clause is often but mistakenly said to provide birthright citizenship to anyone born in on US soil at any time,” Panuccio claimed, hinging his argument on the meaning of American jurisdiction. He cited the example of children of foreign diplomats born on American soil, though gave only half the story. 

Children of diplomats are typically not eligible for American citizenship, being under the jurisdiction of a foreign government, but they are eligible for a Green Card–or permanent residency–at birth, a status that then entitles them to citizenship five years later. Children of diplomats, like diplomats, are also often not subject to American criminal prosecution, not being under American jurisdiction. But undocumented migrants are under American jurisdiction, and are prosecuted en masse. 

Panuccio did not go so far as to guess how the Supreme Court will rule on the Birthright Citizenship case pending before it, though the totality of his analysis suggests he thinks the court will reflect his own, and that, as in the majority of countries, the birthright will soon be history. But the court has been blocking the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans.