Cite as: 520 U. S. 681 (1997)
Breyer, J., concurring in judgment
policy arguments). See also The Federalist No. 71, at 431 (A. Hamilton); P. Kurland, Watergate and the Constitution 135 (1978) (President is "sole indispensable man in government" and "should not be called" from his duties "at the instance of any other . . . branch of government"); Calabresi, Some Normative Arguments for the Unitary Executive, 48 Ark. L. Rev. 23, 37-47 (1995). Cf. T. Roosevelt, An Autobiography 372 (1913).
For present purposes, this constitutional structure means that the President is not like Congress, for Congress can function as if it were whole, even when up to half of its members are absent, see U. S. Const., Art. I, § 5, cl. 1. It means that the President is not like the Judiciary, for judges often can designate other judges, e. g., from other judicial circuits, to sit even should an entire court be detained by personal litigation. It means that, unlike Congress, which is regularly out of session, U. S. Const., Art. I, §§ 4, 5, 7, the President never adjourns.
More importantly, these constitutional objectives explain why a President, though able to delegate duties to others, cannot delegate ultimate responsibility or the active obligation to supervise that goes with it. And the related constitutional equivalence between President, Congress, and the Judiciary means that judicial scheduling orders in a private civil case must not only take reasonable account of, say, a particularly busy schedule, or a job on which others critically depend, or an underlying electoral mandate. They must also reflect the fact that interference with a President's ability to carry out his public responsibilities is constitutionally equivalent to interference with the ability of the entirety of Congress, or the Judicial Branch, to carry out its public obligations.
II
The leading case regarding Presidential immunity from suit is Nixon v. Fitzgerald. Before discussing Fitzgerald, it is helpful to understand the historical precedent on which it
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