(CNSNews.com) - Former Attorney General Ed Meese says the Obama administration’s “disdain for Congress” and its efforts to consolidate power within the executive branch through the use of “czars” makes it “as close to a monarchy as since the days of George III.”

“In what was purported to be the most transparent and the most law abiding administration in history, as the president said when he was inaugurated, has now sunk into the least transparent and the most disdainful of the Constitution as we’ve ever seen,” Meese said during a panel discussion Tuesday sponsored by the American Action Network.

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Meese and former White House Counsel Boyden Gray discusse excesses of executive power by the Obama administration.

Both discussed the recent appointments President Obama to the National Labor Relations Board without Senate approval, as well as the appointment of Richard Cordray as head of the Consumer Financial Protections Board.

Meese also pointed to the 44 different “czars” currently serving in the Obama White House in a wide variety of areas, and quipped that the Obama administration has had more czars than Russia had.

“The whole idea is the czar is part of Obama’s scheme of centralizing all the power right around him in the White House,” Meese said.

“The way the executive branch of the government works is you have bureaucratic norms in which the various departments have their responsibilities,” Meese said. “This is a way of getting around that by having people responsible only to him, many of them not confirmable because they are part of the White House apparatus and most of them not subject to questioning by Congress because of their White House status.”