Quiz: Can a U.S. President Do That?

Laws regarding secretly recording conversations (called "one-party consent") vary from state to state. However, the District of Columbia allows the practice, meaning the president can certainly record anything he wants … even if doing so comes back to haunt him.

The National Emergencies Act was enacted in 1976 and has seen vigorous use by many presidents. As of April 2021, presidents have declared 77 national emergencies.

National emergencies can drag on indefinitely. Of the 77 emergencies declared since 1976, 40 are still active.

Relationships between the White House and reporters are often frosty. Only in the rarest cases have journalists been banned from press conferences, and that partly why it's unclear as to whether such restrictions are unconstitutional or illegal.

During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln took the bold and extremely controversial move of suspending habeas corpus, essentially giving the Union Army the ability to arrest and imprison just about anyone without a warrant and without a trial. And Lincoln did so in direct defiance of the chief justice of the Supreme Court, who said the president was clearly overstepping his bounds.

Executive privilege means a president can withhold information from Congress, the courts, etc. "in the public interest." This right is not spelled out in the Constitution but many presidents (including the three listed here) have invoked it especially when faced with a subpoena.

President Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace after being implicated in a vast array of alleged criminal activities. Vice President Gerald Ford immediately became president and pardoned him for any criminal actions that Nixon may have committed, sparing Nixon from indictment. The pardon may have cost Ford re-election.

In 1952, looming strikes in the steel industry threatened America's capabilities in the Korean War, so President Harry Truman took things into his own hands, nationalizing the entire industry. The Supreme Court ruled that the president absolutely did not have the power to simply step in and take over private companies.

As far back as George Washington, U.S. presidents have used presidential declarations or executive orders to impose their polices. There's no limit to how many a president can sign, and Franklin Roosevelt holds the record, having signed 3,721 orders during his long stay in office.

The U.S. Constitution says only Congress has the power to declare war, unless there is an emergency situation. But that hasn't stopped many presidents from authorizing troops be deployed to various countries. Justifications for this range from calling the deployments "police actions" to pointing out that the president is the commander- in-chief of the troops.