Schmittian Legalism in the White House

The article documents how Carl Schmitt’s Weimar‑era theory of the sovereign and the exception has been picked up (directly or indirectly) by legal thinkers and policymakers after 9/11 and reappears in current postliberal White House arguments for sweeping executive authority. It links academic reception of Schmitt to concrete policy choices — detention, emergency powers, and constitutional reinterpretation — suggesting an intellectual map for how anti‑Madisonian ideas travel from theory to practice. — If Schmittian ideas are shaping modern executive practice, debates about emergency powers, judicial review, and the survival of separation of powers acquire new urgency and need to be framed around intellectual genealogy as well as policy.