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DONALD J. TRUMP has declared that as president, he would bring back waterboarding “and more” as options for interrogating terrorism suspects. But anti-torture laws forbid that. Does he believe the Constitution would empower him, as commander in chief, to override those limits?
Hillary Clinton has suggested that she would shield undocumented immigrants from deportation if their children were granted temporary status under a 2012 program. But the Justice Department has told President Obama that such action would exceed his authority. What limits does she believe exist on executive power to not enforce laws against groups of people?
As the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary approach, voters appear unlikely to know the answers to such questions. Both Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton — the leading candidates for the Republican and Democratic nominations — declined to answer questions submitted by The New York Times about their understanding of the scope and limits of the powers they would wield if elected.
They are hardly alone. Of the Republican contenders, only Rand Paul responded. The campaigns of Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, John Kasich and Marco Rubio, among others, declined or did not answer. Mrs. Clinton’s two Democratic rivals, Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders, also turned down the survey.
By contrast, virtually all the serious candidates engaged with similar surveys I submitted during the last two presidential elections. This year’s silence suggests a striking shift in political calculus.
I first did the survey eight years ago while working at The Boston Globe. Nine of the 12 campaigns I contacted decided to participate, including both eventual nominees — Mr. Obama and John McCain.
“The American people need to know where we stand on these issues before they entrust us with this responsibility,” Mr. Obama wrote in his response in December 2007.
In 2011, working for The New York Times, I updated the survey to address new controversies and submitted it to the Republican primary field. Five of the seven campaigns I contacted participated, including the eventual nominee, Mitt Romney, who said he agreed that all would-be presidents should tell voters their answers to such questions. “They deserve serious consideration by all candidates,” Mr. Romney wrote.
So last September, I again updated the survey and submitted it to the major campaigns.
The questions included: When can a president keep information secret from Congress or the public; detain or kill American terrorism suspects without trial; override statutes governing surveillance, torture and Guantánamo detainee transfers; and attack another country without congressional authorization?
Mr. Paul, in his response, wrote that he was willing to engage because he was seeking “to restore our constitutional system of separation of powers” after a decade of “unconstitutional claims of authority by the president.” (Back in 2011, after Mr. Obama authorized the bombing of Libya without congressional authorization, Mr. Paul denounced the move in a Senate speech while standing before a poster of a quote from Mr. Obama’s 2007 answers to my survey. Mr. Obama said then that the Constitution did not give presidents the power to do such a thing.)
But none of the other campaigns chose to answer the questions. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign did provide a general statement in which she expressed pride in helping the Obama team turn the corner on certain Bush administration detainee policies. She added that while she would fight terrorism “vigorously,” she would only appoint officials and adopt policies that protected human rights and were “faithful to the law.”
But when it comes to executive power, people often disagree about what it means to be faithful to “the law.” So why are the candidates so less willing this time to tell voters what they think?
The dynamics may be different for each party. Among Republicans, possible explanations include not wanting to acknowledge expansive views of executive power at a time when conservatives are portraying Mr. Obama as imperial, or to identify limits they might later exceed.
“Maybe this is the Obama lesson,” said Harold Bruff, a University of Colorado constitutional law professor. “ ‘I don’t want to say anything because someone will make hay of it.’ ”
Still, those factors existed four years ago, too. What seems to have changed is the Republican electorate’s attitude. The establishment candidates like Mr. Bush have advisers who worked in previous Republican administrations and could draft answers based on their experience. But Mr. Trump’s wild-card campaign is overshadowing those candidates. If expertise does not matter to primary voters, what’s the point of tackling hard questions?
“The front-runner has shown he doesn’t have to get into the weeds, so there is no percentage of doing it for the rest,” said Bruce Buchanan, a political-science professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “Why get specific and give someone a target to criticize?”
For Democrats, Mrs. Clinton’s demurral is especially noteworthy because she did participate in 2007. But that was a time when Democrats controlled Congress and liberals were upset about what they saw as Mr. Bush’s overreaching on executive power, including bypassing laws against torture. Now Republicans control the legislative branch, and many liberals have cheered Mr. Obama’s executive actions as a way to get things done despite what they see as congressional obstructionism.
Looking forward to 2017, Republicans seem likely to maintain control of the House. As a result, if a Democrat wins the presidency, the next White House would be likely to govern with the same playbook Mr. Obama has deployed since 2011: taking disputed executive actions, hoping Democratic lawmakers block legislation to undo them and weathering litigation. (Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case challenging Mr. Obama’s 2014 executive actions on immigration.)
“I don’t think Hillary or Bernie or O’Malley want to say, ‘I promise not to be assertive in the use of executive branch authority,’ when they may have every bit as much trouble as Obama has had in getting Congress to work with them,” said Peter Shane, a constitutional law professor at Ohio State University.
If that is where we are headed, my survey’s very failure may still have told voters some things they should know.
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