Signs are appearing all over my neighborhood. They say “Rejecting Kings Since 1776.”
It does not take much political sophistication to grasp the upshot of this messaging. It is a focus-group-tested slogan to use against President Donald Trump. We have no history of kings or monarchs. The Founders were very clear about that. Our leaders would be elected by the people.
There is widespread agreement on that point. But oddly a general bias against monarchs is not actually a helpful lens through which to understand the main controversies of our time. The kind of power that Trump is deploying right now—here we leave aside the issue of trade and tariffs—is mainly about the ability of the president to be in charge of his own executive branch.
You might think that we have settled law and precedent that could decisively offer the answer. Incredibly, we do not. The rise of the administrative state with more than 400 agencies and millions of employees with the power to make regulation and law is not something that has been clearly adjudicated by the highest court.
Why not? Mostly because presidents have not really set out to offer a comprehensive challenge to the power of the agencies. Trump is arguably the first to make a forceful claim to be in charge of the agencies. He and his staff knew for sure that this claim would be subject to litigation and likely rejected by lower courts. But they also believed that forcing the Supreme Court to intervene was worth the risk.
So far, the highest court has generally sided with the Trump administration against lower court attempts to restrict the power of the elected president over executive agencies. But the decisions have largely turned on procedural grounds, and these have been issued by a divided court with narrow wins. What we await is a serious and large decision on the general topic of presidential authority.
Is this about kingmaking? Not at all. It is about the ability of the head of state to determine policy within his own branch of government. Nor is it about stepping on the privileges and powers of the legislative and judicial branches. It is about recognizing the authority of each branch to manage its own shop.
Consider the alternatives to having the elected president determine policy within his administration. It means allowing the agencies to act without any sort of accountability to anyone, not voters, not courts, not the president. That has been largely the case for many decades. Nothing in the Constitution would seem to permit that. And yet that is exactly where we are.
Everyone is awaiting this decision. So long as it does not come down, there will be uncertainty within the White House about exactly what is possible, what policies will stick, and what policies will be overturned by the courts.
It comes down to this. The Trump administration bears full responsibility for whatever emanates from the executive branch during his term. In 2020, I blamed Trump for what the CDC, NIH, and FDA did. I took this position somewhat naively, thinking that Trump was surely in charge. I’ve since learned that this is not the case. There has been a long presumption within all these agencies that they can ignore the president.
It’s the same with military policy. The president bears responsibility for wars and interventions and their effects. Trump blamed Biden for the disaster in Afghanistan and this is as it should be. It’s been the same with all presidents in American history. The success or failure of any single presidential term falls squarely on the shoulders of one man.
So long as that remains true, it only makes sense that the president must also have control of the actions and policies of executive branch agencies. I don’t see how it could be otherwise, not if we respect the Constitution and deploy common sense to understand how any organization including government must work.
These signs in my neighborhood decry the emergence of King Trump but if you look at the bulk of his executive orders, they are not about expanding government power. They are about restricting it in most cases, against the expansionary wishes of the agencies listed in the organizational chart as executive agencies. Trump is pushing for spending cuts, personnel cuts, consolidations, and even the abolition of departments. The lower courts are saying that he does not have the power to cut the deployment of power!
In other words, these signs have it exactly backward. Trump is generally trying to restrain the kings of the agencies. To be sure, there are some exceptions to this rule, and the use of his Congressionally-granted trade power is a case in point. But overall and domestically, Trump is reducing and not expanding the power of government over the American people.
A consistent rejection of kings would imply the ability of the president elected by the people to diminish or abolish the divine right of the bureaucratic kings that have ruled the country for so long.
It might seem strange that the United States would be undertaking this debate after 250 years of existence. It is foundational and hugely significant. Why did it have to wait so long? The reason has to do with the timeline. We did not even have a federal civil service until 1883. Even then, it did not become a problem except in wartime. The income tax intensified it but then the expansion of government power for the century following made it worse year by year.
A potential flaw in the American system is that presidents only have a four-year term. They have been outsmarted and outwitted by huge and well-funded agencies that have longevity. They have long floated above the political system, largely ignoring it and intensifying their own power.
Trump is a unique case. In his first term, he was largely bested by the bureaucracy. He lost his reelection bid and had four years in exile to think through a strategy for combating such internal subversion. He has been working to deploy that strategy since the first hour following his inauguration. Even from the months before, his transition team rejected public financing and government background checks precisely to minimize the capacity of the “deep state” to stop a new agenda.
Regardless of your politics—you can love or hate any aspect of Trump’s agenda—it is in the interest of everyone that the president be in charge of the executive branch. Otherwise, the whole point of voting and the notion of government by and for the people is undermined.
A clear decision by the Supreme Court could begin and end simply by quoting Article II, Section I, Clause I: “The executive power is vested in a President of the United States.”
Any court justice unwilling to sign off on that opinion does not believe in the Constitution and should not be on the court.
