In last week’s vice presidential debate, Joe Biden criticized Dick Cheney’s notion that the office of the vice president does not exist wholly within the executive branch of the government, blaming Cheney for “aggrandiz[ing] the power of a unitary executive.” This is not the first time Biden has thrown around the concept of the “unitary executive” as a fancy-sounding stand-in for a whole parade of terribles: including, apparently, claims that the Bush administration has usurped power from Congress, inappropriately wielded executive discretion, and generally expanded executive authority so as to bring all of Middle-earth under the heel of Mordor.

At a press event last fall, for example, in response to the question of whether a future president would want to “give up the unitary power that Bush has accumulated,” Biden launched into a rant about the commutation of Scooter Libby’s sentence. Especially given Biden’s propensity to describe himself as a constitutional law professor (he has taught as an adjunct at Widener Law School), it is important to point out that he is completely confused as to what the common constitutional interpretive theory of the unitary executive actually means.