The Appointments Clause and Removal Power

Roman Mars hosts What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law, a series that uses the unprecedented events of a single presidency as a live case study in American government. The core of the podcast comes from constitutional law professor Elizabeth Joh, who found her usual curriculum upended during those four years. Instead of relying solely on settled historical cases, she began scrambling to reconcile the latest presidential tweet or statement with centuries of judicial precedent minutes before walking into her classroom. Each episode digs into one of those real-time constitutional puzzles-questions about pardons, emoluments, executive orders, and presidential power that moved from theoretical to urgently practical. Listening feels like auditing a dynamic, topical seminar where complex legal concepts are unpacked through the lens of recent history. You’ll hear how the foundational document is stretched, tested, and interpreted not in the abstract, but through the actions of the 45th president. This isn’t about politics; it’s about the machinery of the constitution itself, examined at a moment when it was under extraordinary public scrutiny. The podcast makes the often-opaque world of constitutional law accessible and immediately relevant, showing how its principles are constantly being defined by the present.