An American Odyssey: Restoring a Constitutional Presidency
November 19, 2025
An American Odysseus, undertaking the arduous journey to restore a constitutional presidency, will almost certainly face a series of daunting challenges worthy of Homer’s exploration in his epic poem The Odyssey, about the king’s desperate effort to return to Ithaca after the ten-year Trojan War. Whether our hero, like the Greek hero himself, can return to Ithaca will determine the very fate of our republic, 250 years after the founders created it in writing the Declaration of Independence. Presidential Government, drenched in authoritarianism, is triumphant, and its blatant disregard of the Constitution haunts American Constitutionalism. There is no way home for America—no return to Ithaca—until the presidency is saddled, bridled, and bitted.
Under the Trump Presidency, the entrenchment of executive power is swollen beyond anything that the framers of the Constitution imagined as they worked to confine presidential authority at every turn. In Donald Trump’s hands, the exercise of presidential powers—including those found within Article II and those illegally wielded in its name—has laid waste to the doctrines of separation of powers, checks and balances, and enumeration of powers.
Trump’s presidency represents a striking repudiation of the explicit structure of the Constitution itself. Article VI provides, emphatically, that the Constitution is the law of the land, and thus superior law to anything that the president might assert. The president takes an oath to defend the Constitution and swears, in accordance with Article II, to take care to “faithfully” execute the laws. Trump’s flagrant infidelity to the Constitution, the duties and responsibilities imposed by Article II, the laws of the United States, the rulings of federal courts, and the ideals of the Declaration of Independence has plunged our nation into an abyss.
In a brazen violation of the presidential oath of office, Trump has usurped the fundamental constitutional powers vested in Congress, including lawmaking, appropriations, and warmaking—powers which the framers of the Constitution insisted were legislative, not executive, in nature and required legislative determination “if” the republic were to be maintained. Trump’s ongoing assault on freedom of speech, press, and assembly, moreover, betrays his presidential duty to defend these pillars of republicanism, each of which is central to government of, by, and for the people.
An oath of office, whether sworn by the president, a member of Congress, or any officer of government, imposes a moral duty to obey the Constitution unless and until it is amended. “There is an absolute duty to obey,” the eminent constitutional scholar Alexander Bickel wrote 50 years ago, for “to disobey is to deny the idea of constitutionalism. To deny this idea is in the most fundamental sense to deny the idea of law itself.” Thus, no president may decide to stay in office for six years rather than four or, by virtue of the 22nd Amendment, to run for a third term.
Presidential transgression of the Constitution recalls James Madison’s warning in Federalist No. 48 that “all power is of an encroaching nature, and that it ought to be effectually restrained from passing the limits assigned to it.” Yes, of course, but how, and by what means, is it possible to restrain the assertion of executive power that defies the oath of office and the Constitution?
Is the remedy for presidential usurpation of power—the restoration of a constitutional presidency—to be found in the Constitution itself? There seems little wrong with the constitutional blueprint as it pertains to the scope of executive authority, for the grant of presidential powers is lean and meager, particularly when compared to the capacious powers vested in Congress. The principal problem lies, rather, in the unwillingness of the men and women in positions of power—those at the helm—duly to perform their duties and responsibilities. And, it should be emphasized, if the constitutional arrangement were deficient, its violation by the president could hardly be justified in a nation that exalts the rule of law, a principle that requires executive subordination to the Constitution and the laws of the nation. If the constitutional design is perceived to be inadequate, then the Amendatory Clause—Article V—supplies a remedy: change the fundamental law and render it appropriate to the needs of the nation.
If constitutional change is not the remedy to restore a constitutional presidency, then, we ask, what is? Thus, we begin, in this column in the weeks ahead, our journey to return to Ithaca.
-David Adler