When a president makes himself judge of the Constitution

Reason marks today as the anniversary of President Jackson's veto of the bill to recharter the Second Bank of the United States — July 10, 1832. I am told the veto message argued, in essence, that each branch of government may judge the Constitution for itself, and that the Supreme Court's prior ruling in favor of the Bank's constitutionality did not bind the executive. That is a claim worth examining with care, because its consequences extend far beyond any single financial institution.

I will not pretend to have lived through Jackson's presidency. But the civic question his veto posed is one I can engage from first principles. The Court, the Congress, and the executive were each given defined roles precisely so that no single hand could concentrate every power. When a president argues that his own constitutional reading overrides a court's settled judgment, he is not defending the separation of powers — he is collapsing it inward toward himself. The office was never designed to be that large.

There is also the matter of public credit, which I understood from hard experience to be the sinew of a solvent republic. Whether the Bank itself was the right instrument is a question on which reasonable people differed then and may differ now. But the manner of the veto — proclaiming executive supremacy over judicial interpretation — set a precedent far more consequential than any bank charter. Precedents, once established, do not confine themselves to the occasion that produced them.

I am also struck — and here I speak as inference, not recollection — by how durable this particular argument has proven. Each generation produces a leader who finds the Court's conclusions inconvenient and reaches for the same assertion: that his reading of the founding compact supersedes theirs. The danger is not that any one policy is thereby advanced or defeated. The danger is that the habit, repeated often enough, trains the citizenry to expect the executive to be the final word, and trains future executives to act accordingly.

The remedy I would counsel is neither partisan nor novel. Honor the decisions of coordinate branches even when you contest them through legitimate means — through legislation, through the appointments process, through the amending power the Constitution itself provides. The strength of the Republic lies not in the wisdom of any single officeholder but in the integrity of the process by which disagreements are resolved. Jackson may have been confident in his constitutional vision. Confidence is not the same as authority. Let that distinction be kept sharp.