Grace Penn Explains the Decision

From The Diplomat (Netflix)

Run time:  3:43

Note:  At nearly four minutes this runs longer than most clips in the library, and it carries plot detail from late in the series. Preview it and pick a stop point.

Clip Description:  The American vice president lays out the reasoning behind a foreign-policy decision, at length and without apology. A monologue rather than an exchange, which is what makes it usable as a text.

American Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To:  Executive discretion in foreign policy; the vice presidency as an office whose power comes from proximity rather than from the Constitution; the distance between a decision’s justification and its authorization; the two-presidencies thesis and why presidents face weaker constraints abroad than at home.

Possible Uses in Classroom:  Best used as a close-reading exercise rather than an opener. Give students the first discussion question in advance, play it once without discussion, then play it again. Students who try to answer it on one viewing almost always reconstruct the justification more charitably than the scene actually states it.

---

Discussion Questions

1. Strip the scene down to the decision and the justification. Is the justification sufficient? Answer on its own terms before you answer on yours.
2. What formal power does an American vice president actually hold, and how much of what happens here rests on formal power rather than on proximity to the president?
3. The monologue is written to be persuasive. Name the strongest objection it does not answer.

Assignment

Take one foreign-policy action a president took without prior congressional authorization. Two pages: the legal basis the administration claimed, the objection Congress raised, and how it was resolved or left unresolved. Use the Office of Legal Counsel opinion and the congressional record rather than press coverage. Close on whether the check that was supposed to operate actually did, and say what would have had to be different for it to work.

Clip hosted on YouTube, posted by Still Watching Netflix.

---

For AP Students

AP U.S. Government and Politics
Unit 2: Interactions Among Branches of Government

Topics: 2.6 Presidential Powers; 2.7 Roles and Powers of the President; 2.8 Checks on the Presidency

The CED asks students to explain how presidents use formal and informal powers in foreign policy and how Congress checks them. The scene is a sustained piece of executive reasoning, which is rarer on screen than it sounds.

Discussion questions

1. Distinguish the formal from the informal powers of the presidency and place three of the president’s foreign-policy tools in the right column. Which column is harder for Congress to reach?
2. The War Powers Resolution was written to constrain exactly this kind of decision. Explain what it requires, then explain why presidents of both parties have treated it as advisory.
3. The vice presidency has almost no constitutional power. Account for the fact that recent vice presidents have nevertheless been consequential, and say what your answer implies about how to measure power in the executive branch.

Short activity

Formal or informal (15 minutes). Read out twelve presidential actions one at a time — a veto, an executive agreement, a press conference, a pardon, a signing statement, a phone call to a wavering senator — and have students hold up one finger for formal and two for informal. Spend the last five minutes on the three the room split on. Signing statements and executive agreements are usually where the argument is, and that argument is the free-response question.