President’s Day:  Forgotten Lessons from the Framers of the Constitution

Confronted with the dangers of expansive executive power, our nation’s founders sought to curb it at every turn. The authors of the Declaration of Independence produced a lengthy list of grievances against the tyrant, King George III, in service of the American Revolution. In the Constitutional Convention, the framers sharply limited the scope of authority vested in the newly minted presidency, above all, to fence off exercise of the crown’s discretionary prerogative powers. The framers replaced the personalization of executive power with the institutionalization and constitutional confinement of presidential power. In their replacement of personal rule with the rule of law, the framers rejected the historical admiration of the executive and the cult of personality that had reigned since the Middle Ages. In the United States, presidential power would flow, not from the “blood and bone of the man,” but rather from the Constitution.

Reflections on President’s Day 2026– the concentration of power in the hands of President Donald Trump, his sweeping and repeated acts of abuse and usurpation of power, and the failure of institutions to check it– suggest Americans have forgotten vital lessons from the founding that ought to resonate across our nation.

The framers rejected a powerful presidency. James Wilson, second to James Madison as an architect of the Constitution, told his colleagues, “The prerogatives of the Crown are of no moment” in the creation of the republic. Madison swept away the pretense of unbridled executive authority: presidential power is “confined and defined.” As students of history will recall, he stated that, “in a republic the legislature predominates.”
To temper executive power, the drafters of the Constitution granted the lion’s share of governmental power to Congress. Presidential powers, enumerated in Article II, were meager by comparison, only painstakingingly granted and subject to numerous institutional checks. For a generation that lived in dread fear of discretionary executive power, there was no interest in recreating an embryonic monarchy on American soil.

The Constitution embodies a pattern of authority limited by division and hedged by restraints, a design that reflects the framers’ enthusiastic commitment to enumeration of powers, separation of powers and checks and balances. Justice Louis Brandeis, the most scholarly of justices, wrote in 1926: “The doctrine of the separation of powers was adopted by the Convention of 1787, not to promote efficiency, but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power.” The purpose, he wrote, was “to save the people from autocracy.”

Expansive executive power has long been the bane of American Constitutionalism. Today, it is the bane of our existence. The framers, to a man, were convinced of the need to protect against the concentration of power. It reflected their deep-seated belief that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. For the founders, power was a constant threat to liberty. Accordingly, it was not the object of trust, but rather, mistrust, which led Thomas Jefferson to write, “we bind government by the chains of the Constitution.” Without vigilance, ambitious presidents can slip the chains of the Constitution. In 1952, Justice Felix Frankfurter observed: “The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.” As things stand, the flow of power to the executive shows no signs of ebbing.

Watergate, our first experience with a would-be autocrat, was more than the personal tragedy of Richard Nixon. Apart from Nixon’s contempt for the rule of law, it was, taken as a whole, a function of the decline of separation of powers, checks and balances and institutional values. The claims of political expediency, rather than demands for adherence to constitutional principles, first in foreign affairs, and then domestic matters, purported to justify the concentration of power in the executive. In the aftermath of Watergate, remedies and devices were put in place to restrain the flow of power to the executive. Over time, however, those restraints have weakened and disappeared. As a result, on this President’s Day, we note that the concentration of executive power in the hands of President Donald Trump is greater than it has ever been. Considering his predecessors, there is not even a close second.

History may not repeat itself, but as Mark Twain observed, “it rhymes.” The question, in our time, is when will we heed vital lessons from the founding?