Article II, Section 3: Miscellaneous Powers and Duties of the President
He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.
Article II, Section 3 consists of a single long clause outlining additional powers and duties of the President.
The first subclause is the basis of one of our more disreputable civic rituals, the annual State of the Union Address. The subclause requires the President to report on the state of the Union to Congress from time to time; the report need not be annual and it need not be given in person. However, George Washington set the precedent for both, delivering an annual message to Congress in person. Jefferson continued the practice of an annual message, but delivered his in writing. Jefferson considered an address directly to Congress as too monarchical, with an uncomfortable resemblance to the British practice of the Speech from the Throne. Wilson revived the practice of addressing Congress directly in 1913, for its political value, and the temptation to milk the occasion for its political worth has been powerful enough to entrench this practice to the present day.
We object to this practice, both for the reasons given by Jefferson, and because the ritual and pageantry associated with the address render impossible any kind of frank report to Congress of the actual state of the Union. Even more disreputable is the “Response” that is now given by the opposing party to every State of the Union address. The very existence of this response, which is not voted by Congress and so is not actually an official Congressional response, is an acknowledgement that the State of the Union is, effectively, a partisan campaign speech.
The President is also given power to convene Congress, but only under extraordinary conditions and not as a general practice. He may not adjourn Congress unless the two houses cannot agree on when adjournment should take place; attempts by the President to adjourn Congress when there is no such disagreement have been struck down by the courts, mostly in connection with the Congressional practice of preventing recess appointments by holding pro forma sessions.
The President is also responsible for formally receiving diplomats from foreign states when they present their credentials.
The President is charged with seeing that the laws are faithfully executed. A President is bound by his oath of office to execute even laws he disagrees with, so long as they are not actually unconstitutional. When the President believes a law is unconstitutional, and since the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, he is bound by his oath to refuse to execute the law. A President sincerely convinced a law is unconstitutional, and refusing to execute it, even after the Supreme Court disagrees with him, is one of several ways government officers acting in good faith could stumble into a constitutional crisis.
Finally, all officers of the United States receive their commission from the President. No distinction is made between civil and military officers, and both receive formal written commissions from the President, once their nominations are ratified by the Senate (in the case of senior officers.) “Non-commissioned officers” are thus something of an oxymoron; under U.S. law, corporals and sergeants are not actually officers of any kind. Neither are warrant officers, who receive their warrant from the Secretary of Defense.