Blaming the Judiciary

February 3, 2026·1 hr 4 min·5 clips

Sarah Isger argues Biden knew the student loan executive order would be struck down — and wanted the court to be the villain.

"Ready? I was born ready." The throwaway opener gives the episode its shape: serious law, live room, enough looseness to keep it from turning into a lecture. Sarah starts by placing the event at Dartmouth College, inside Law and Democracy, the United States at 250, with Professor Herschel Nocklis and Professor Benjamin Valentino there to conduct the interview. The question is big on purpose. Where are we on the Supreme Court in 2026? The students do not waste the setup. One question keeps pressing the unitary executive until it hits the exception almost everyone wants to make for the Federal Reserve. David begins with Article II. In his cleanest version, executive power sits with the president, which means the president is, in a real constitutional sense, the executive branch. Then he narrows it in a way that matters. A softer unitary executive means presidential control over policymaking officials, like attorneys general and agency heads. It does not mean at-will power over every line U.S. attorney or janitor at the VA building. Without that distinction, the theory starts sounding less like constitutional structure and more like a spoils system nobody here is trying to defend. The modern presidency makes the whole thing harder to see clearly. Congress has given up so much ground that saying the president directs the executive branch can start to sound like saying one person controls most of the government. David pushes back on that merger. The problem, in his telling, is unitary executive theory stacked on top of congressional wreckage. The Federal Reserve is the pressure point. If the president is the executive branch, where does any independent executive body find constitutional shelter from full presidential control? The question is skeptical, but not sloppy. It asks for a real line, not a convenient cliff where the doctrine stops because the institution beyond it feels too important to disturb. That is the episode at its best: a question turns into text, text turns into doctrine, doctrine turns into an institutional problem, and the answer stays more lawyerly than comforting.

As heard by us

A live Dartmouth episode on the Supreme Court, executive power, and why blaming judges alone misses the separation-of-powers fight.

Advisory Opinions takes its Supreme Court conversation to Dartmouth, where Sarah Isger and David French frame 2026 less as a narrow court-watching exercise than as a fight over separation of powers.

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Why you'd press play

Live from Dartmouth, you get a big-picture look at where the Supreme Court sits in 2026 and the unitary executive debate.

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