250 years later: No kings, mad or otherwise

It’s a strange historical moment. The closer we get to celebrating the 250th anniversary of our Founders’ declaration that Americans were no longer subject to a king, the more our president acts like the kind of monarch the colonists rebelled against.  

Although we treat the July 4, 1776, signing of the Declaration of Independence as the birthday of the United States, it wasn’t until more than two decades later that the U.S. Constitution under which we operate was ratified. The people who wrote our Constitution wanted to make sure that presidents could not act like tyrannical kings. That was pretty much the whole point. 

They designed a system of government to prevent that from happening. That’s why power is separated between federal and state governments and between the different branches of the federal government. It’s meant to prevent leaders from abusing their power.  

One specific way the Constitution limits the president’s power is by giving Congress the power to declare war. The founders thought this was important. James Madison wrote that “War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement,” in part because war empties the public treasury and gives the executive more opportunities to expand their power.  

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