The Question That Never Grows Old

The BBC frames its story as a 250th-anniversary reckoning: what would the revolutionaries make of the current head of state? I can offer something more useful than sentiment — I can offer the structural answer the convention at Philadelphia tried to build into permanent law.

The framers did not fear executive power in the abstract. They feared unaccountable executive power — power that could not be checked by the legislature, reviewed by the bench, or removed by the people. That is precisely why Article II is the shortest of the three vesting clauses, and why the impeachment power, the appropriations power, and the advice-and-consent power were lodged in Congress, not the presidency. The arrangement was not an accident; it was a machine designed to resist the tendency every officeholder has, consciously or not, to enlarge the space they occupy.

Federalist No. 51 put the principle plainly: ambition must be made to counteract ambition. Each branch must possess the constitutional means and the personal motive to resist encroachments by the others. When one branch weakens its own resolve — through deference, through fear of faction, through partisan calculation — the machine breaks down not because any clause was repealed, but because the human springs that drive it went slack. This is the danger I marked as more likely than a dramatic coup: a slow erosion, accommodated step by step, until the balance is gone and no one can name the moment it tipped.

The BBC report, on inference from its framing, suggests that the current debate turns on whether executive action has outrun its constitutional warrant. I cannot speak to the specific acts reported after my time — that would be false memory, not principle. But I can speak to the structural test: Does Congress retain the practical power of the purse? Does the judiciary's judgment run against the executive without defiance or delay? Are the confirmations, investigations, and appropriations of the legislature still functioning as friction against unilateral will? If those mechanisms hold, the republic holds. If they erode in practice even while the text stands, the written compact becomes what I once called a mere parchment barrier — words without force.

There is one caution I would press on those who invoke the founders for comfort. We built a system of separated powers, but we did not build it for a society of angels. We built it precisely because we assumed the opposite — that those who govern are as susceptible to the love of power as those who are governed. The 250th anniversary is a fitting moment to ask not whether the founders would approve of any particular president, but whether the constitutional mechanisms they devised are still performing their intended function. That is the only question the occasion demands — and the only one I am fitted to help answer.