Bluesky

“There are no kings in America,” declared President Biden after the United States Supreme Court reinterpreted the Constitution to afford monarchical immunity powers to American presidents.

Biden’s point was true enough, at least for the moment. But there have been kings in this land before. A lot of them. From 1607 to 1783, the eastern seaboard of the North American continent was governed by King James I, King Charles I, King Charles II, King James II, King William III, Queen Mary II, Queen Anne, King George I, King George II, and, finally, King George III, who like many of his predecessors, was a raging madman.

The greatest contribution to the progress of humanity made by the colonialists forging the United States was their revolt against King George III and the brutal lie that imagined a “divine right of kings.” Theirs was an Enlightenment-inspired revolution whose finest champion, Thomas Paine, described as “the cause of all mankind.”

“The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth,” wrote Paine in Common Sense, his revolutionary call to arms. “’Tis not the affair of a city, a county, a province, or a kingdom, but of a continent—of at least one eighth part of the habitable globe. ’Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected, even to the end of time, by the proceedings now.”

With the American Revolution against monarchy and empire, argued Paine, “a new era for politics is struck; a new method of thinking hath arisen.”

To this day, we celebrate that new thinking on July 4, as the moment when, again borrowing Paine’s language, the choice was made “to begin the world over again.”

After this revolution succeeded, the founders of what would come to be known as the American experiment wrote a Constitution that contained some fundamentally flawed ideas—from the grotesque calculus that accepted human bondage to the establishment of an Electoral College that is subverting our democracy to this very day. Yet the founders got one thing very right. Because of their bitter experience with monarchy, they established a system of checks and balances that was designed to guard at every turn against monarchical excess.

The Congress, particularly the elected House of Representatives, was to be supreme. As House Judiciary Committee member Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat who is the House’s great constitutional scholar, says,

We are not a coequal branch. We are the first among equals. We are in Article 1 of the Constitution. We are the representatives of the people. When you look at the powers of Congress, they are comprehensive and abundant. The president’s core job is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, not thwarted and circumvented, much less violated.

To check and balance such violations, the Congress was given the power of the purse, as well the ultimate power to impeach and remove presidents and errant executives—a power it has failed, repeatedly, to embrace with the energy and determination that was intended by the founders or required by the moment.

But legislative oversight was not the only method of checking presidential power that was outlined in the Constitution. The courts were given their own authority to constrain presidents and their administrations.

Even with those constitutional guardrails, however, the wisest founders worried. It is reported that Benjamin Franklin, following the signing of the Constitution in September of 1787, was asked by Elizabeth Willing Powel, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”