The King and We

The latest libel of President Trump being used by the Democrats is that he’s a king. Hah. It’s a laughable canard. The truth is that even the strongest of our presidents is bound by oath to a Constitution that limits the time he can serve in office, requires him to faithfully execute the laws, empowers Congress to override his vetos, and in the strictest possible terms prohibits any state or the federal government from granting anyone a title of nobility.That makes the libel that Mr. Trump is some kind of king completely ridiculous. On top of it there are the hard facts of life for any president, which Mr. Trump marked today in comments to the press. Asked about the nationwide series of “No Kings” protests planned for Saturday, as counterprogramming to the parade Mr. Trump has planned to celebrate the 250th birthday of the United States Army, he quipped: “I don’t feel like a king.”One even detected a note of self-pity, as Trump added: “I have to go through hell to get stuff approved,” whereas “A king would say, ‘I’m not going to get this.’” A king, Mr. Trump said, “wouldn’t have to call up Mike Johnson and Thune and say, ‘Fellas you got to pull this off’ and after years we get it done.” That’s a reference to the wrangling on Capitol Hill over the president’s tax and budget legislation. “No, no we’re not a king. We’re not a king at all.”Critics of Mr. Trump, of course, paint a less sanguine portrait of his presidency, pointing, in part, to the wave of executive orders he has issued to push his policy agenda. Many of these orders are getting hashed out in the courts, which serve as another constitutional check on what historian Arthur Schlesinger decried as the “Imperial Presidency.” Even Mr. Trump’s detractors, though, have to concede he exhibits what Hamilton called “Energy in the Executive.”The first treasury secretary called that “a leading character in the definition of good government,” a sentiment that holds up from the distance of more than two centuries, even if a president does now and then kick over a few traces. Presidential energy, Hamilton averred, “is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks,” not to mention “the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy.”A powerful president, as Hamilton saw it, was a safeguard against the procedural hurdles that can gum up the works in representative government. Roman history showed “how often that republic was obliged to take refuge in the absolute power of a single man,” he wrote, amid “the intrigues of ambitious individuals who aspired to the tyranny, and the seditions of whole classes of the community whose conduct threatened the existence of all government.”It would be no safeguard of constitutional governance to have a weak president, Hamilton insisted. “A feeble Executive implies a feeble execution of the government,” he said, and “a government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad government.” Hamilton was writing in support of the Constitution that some feared could lead an overly powerful president to devolve into a kind of tyrant — or even a king.The Constitution, “among other deformities,” Patrick Henry reckoned, “has an awful squinting; it squints towards monarchy.” That fear has flared over the centuries as one of the central tensions in the Framers’ scheme of governance. Today’s handcuffing of Senator Padilla at a press conference that he was reportedly disrupting is fueling a new wave of the kind of criticism that has been leveled against energetic executives going back to Washington. Amid the tumult over the Jay Treaty that made peace with Britain, one pamphleteer asked whether the first president would prove “the tyrant instead of the savior of his country.” One doesn’t have to endorse all of Mr. Trump’s unilateral moves — like, say, imposing tariffs without consulting Congress — to support his constitutional prerogatives. Doesn’t the Framers’ design, after all, encourage more zeal than debility in a president?

The King and We

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