OLC Anecdote
A brief aside on the subject of the Office of Legal Counsel: former OLC attorney Neil Kinkopf, now with the administration’s Office of Legal Policy, shared a funny anecdote with me last year. (Kinkopf was teaching at Georgia State, and I took his constitutional law seminar.) The story was that, during the Reagan years, the walls of the OLC were adorned with large portraits of Scalia and Rehnquist, each of whom had run the OLC before their appointments to the Supremes. The portraits celebrated their status as the “true” conservative jurists on the Court. That is, until Rehnquist authored the opinion in Morrison v. Olson (1988). Hardcore jurisprudential conservatives viewed Morrison as a betrayal. The decision dealt a blow to their muscular theory of executive power—or, more precisely, presidential control of the executive—a.k.a., the “unitary theory of the executive.” After Morrison, Rehnquist’s portrait was taken down from the OLC office wall and stuck in a closet (which later became John Yoo’s office). Scalia played the role of lone, ferocious dissenter and secured for his portrait several more years or prominent display in the OLC office.
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