Rob Goodman is a former House and Senate speechwriter and the co-author of Rome’s Last Citizen.

Of course President Barack Obama is “ an unaccountable monarch.” Of course he's “ an emperor.” It’s not that Ted Cruz and John Boehner, respectively, are right about the president’s immigration order—it’s that the presidency itself is built to attract just these kinds of criticisms. If Obama were the first president to be painted as a king, we’d have good reason to reach for the nearest pitchfork; but when presidents of all parties have been “kings” for more than two centuries, it’s a sign that something deeper is at work. The permanent fight over the presidency’s limits is as much a fixture of our constitutional order as biannual elections or freedom of speech. For better or worse, the American founders started this fight for a reason.

The presidency looks like monarchy because it’s the direct descendant of monarchy. When the founders encountered separation-of-powers theory, they engaged with a tradition of thought that carved out a powerful role for kings. Their single most-read, most-cited author was the French philosopher Montesquieu, who was especially famous for a chapter on the separation of powers under the British system of constitutional monarchy. For Montesquieu, the governments that best protect liberty are those with a conflict at their heart, including a struggle between the legislative and executive powers. But “the executive power ought to be in the hands of a monarch.” This was, in its context, an unremarkable thought; and the qualities Montesquieu associated with his monarch, such as efficiency and “dispatch,” were the same ones the founders associated with the presidency.


When the American founders brought this model of government across the Atlantic, they replaced a hereditary executive with an elected one. But for many of the Constitution’s critics, it was merely a cosmetic change, one that left the monarch’s powers largely untouched. In 1787, John Adams reported a criticism leveled against the new state constitutions by French philosophes and radical American democrats: “They have established…a body of representatives, a council, and a governor, because there is in England a house of commons, a house of lords, and a king.” In other words, powerful executives were a kind of British hangover: a real democracy would be run by the people’s representatives alone. The same year, the Anti-Federalist writing under the name “Cato” took a look at the new national constitution and denounced it for creating a royal “court” that “will incline to an arbitrary and odious aristocracy or monarchy.”

On the left, an 1832 cartoon of Andrew Jackson, depicted as a king, after a bill veto that his opponents called an abuse of presidential authority. On the right, a recent cartoon of Obama after his deportation decision. | Library of Congress, Michael Ramirez-Creators

These critics were responding to something very real in the Constitution: an executive responsible to a national constituency, empowered to act in national crises, not dependent on legislators for selection and sitting alone atop a branch of government. Until 1787, the natural description for an office with those qualities was “monarch.” If the story we tell ourselves about our Constitution is one of powers stripped away from monarchy—real kings, after all, aren’t subject to re-election—there’s an alternative story to be told. That account would stress the traditionally monarchical powers that the presidency kept and even expanded—for instance, the pardon power, the role of head of state or the title of commander in chief ( inherited from England’s King Charles I)—and the way the Constitution’s critics recognized those powers for what they were. In one story, a president is a replacement for a king. In the other, a president is a euphemism for a king.

The result of all this is a conflict between political culture and political institutions that has been impossible to shake: In America, “down with kings” stands right beside “Hail to the Chief.” Presidents on our side are “strong executives,” presidents on the other side are “tyrants.” An American president is almost always a king to someone. To his enemies, John Adams was “His Rotundity, the Duke of Braintree,” who was just as likely to hand the crown over to his son John Quincy as to leave office peaceably. Andrew Jackson made unprecedented use of the veto power and was dubbed “ King Andrew the First.” For freeing slaves by executive order, President Lincoln became “ Abraham Africanus I.” His successor was merely King Andy. And on into our time: King Franklin I, Kings Harry and Dick, King George the Younger and Emperor Obama (perhaps a victim of monarchy inflation).

Now, does the repetition of this trope mean that presidents never abuse their power? Of course it doesn’t; of course they do. But when the same monarchy criticism is leveled against actions as noble as the destruction of human bondage, and as sordid as the Watergate cover-up, it means that the criticism itself tells us next to nothing about a policy’s wisdom or even its legality.

If the argument has lasted into its third century, I’d suggest that the reason has less to do with this veto or that executive order, and more to do with the presidential system itself. Unlike parliamentary systems, which set up a government in one swoop, ours is defined by staggered elections, unevenly overlapping terms of office, conflicting constituencies and disputed mandates. The same Constitution that established the president as the one truly national figure in government also established legislators who are accountable on a much smaller scale and whose elections interrupt presidential terms.

If this is a recipe for near-permanent conflict between executive and legislative, perhaps it’s an accident; as Garrett Epps argued at The Atlantic, “I don’t think any of [the founders] anticipated that the two branches would ever clash over which represented ‘the will of the voters.’” Certainly, many of the founders failed to anticipate political parties. But they did, it seems, imagine that personal ambition would drive inter-branch conflict: as James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51, “The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.” When politicians are accountable to different voters, plotting their futures on different schedules and driven by these incentives to see the world in different ways, some kind of clash is inevitable. And one of the most important forms it takes is the struggle over presidential power, driven by two sides appealing again and again to the same stock arguments, arguments about breadth of constituency and closeness to constituency, or mandates that do or don’t expire, into which they are nearly locked as a consequence of their place in the machinery.

So Obama is “completely ignoring the will of the American voters,” as Sen. John Barrasso said when the president failed to demonstrate enough contrition after the midterms. So Obama can say, with just as much justice: “To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate in the process … I hear you, too.” So 2008 was a mandate for Obamacare, and 2010 was a mandate against it, and 2012 was a mandate for it, and the meaning of 2014 is still being litigated.

It’s all the product of an executive who is mostly unaccountable to the legislature, who answers to a different slice of voters on a different timetable. In other words, the roots of the monarchy criticism are also the roots of this struggle, and both are as old as the republic. If this decade figures into our constitutional history, I imagine it will be as the era in which more of us came to grips with the worst-case cost of the conflict. Government shutdowns, debt-ceiling showdowns, and legislative paralysis may one day look like foreshadowings of a true crisis, in which each branch refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the other.

But the possibility of this crisis, the arguments the founders wrote and locked us into, are arguably the price we have paid to avoid something worse. Whenever an American politician claims to speak for the people, another is certain to answer, “You don’t—I do.” That uncertainty is the curse of presidential politics, and also its blessing. Considering all of the harm that’s been done in the past by leaders who have presented themselves, and ruled, as the people’s one voice, that uncertainty is something of real value. Ironically enough, it depends on a constitutional order in which presidents are prone to be called kings.