Legal advice to a President is always sympathetic to his policy goals. Advisers feel political and personal loyalty to the President who selected them. Competition for influence within the administration fosters telling a President what he wants to hear. Also, the culture of the Executive Branch ensures sympathy. Given these powerful incentives to support the President's policy agenda, what can and should constrain the lawyers? First, there is the obligation of the oath to defend the Constitution that they all take. The lawyers also have a second obligation in their professional responsibility to "exercise independent professional judgment and render candid advice." As Robert Jackson said, "the value of legal counsel is in the detachment of the advisor from the advised." We expect that distance from professionals of all kinds, our doctors for example.
To buttress the duty of independent judgment, executive advisers need to accept the principle of the Steel Seizure case that Congress can lay down the law, even in time of war. Support of a broad initiative power for the executive is fully consistent with this principle. Some of President Bush's lawyers followed a theory that the executive has broad unilateral power in the foreign realm that Congress may not control, except perhaps by withholding funds or impeachment. This risks a destabilizing pursuit of executive hegemony, one very erosive of the rule of law.