The Need for Checks and Balances on an Executive Branch

Back in July Boston 1775 passed on how the federal government installed new signs at the President’s House site in Philadelphia during the night of the All-Star Game.

The National Park Service unveiled a website displaying eleven of those signs, but not all of them.

Among the other panels at the site is one with the subhead “The Need for an Executive Branch.” It quotes from the Publius/Federalist essays, number 70: “Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.” Except that the panel gets that wrong, as Georgetown professor Adam Rothman just pointed out; the panels says energy is “the leading character.”

That essay, written by Alexander Hamilton, argued for investing the government’s executive power in one man, not a pair or a triumvirate or a council, as some of the states were trying. When he wrote of the superiority of one executive over a “greater number,” as the panel goes on to quote, Hamilton wasn’t referring to the legislature or courts. He was referring to imaginary co-Presidents.

The unspoken assumption undergirding Hamilton’s argument was that the executive would carry out the law, not try to dictate it. Only in that way would a vigorous executive secure “liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy.”

At the Broad Street Review, Alaina Johns pointed out another inaccuracy in the new signage:

One panel on executive power lauds [George] Washington for relinquishing the presidency, claiming that “this peaceful transfer of power from Washington to [John] Adams, and every president since, ensures the stability of the government and places the power back where it belongs: in the hands of the American people.”

In truth, that tradition of peaceful transfer lasted from 1797 until 2021, when Trump’s supporters responded to his election loss by storming the US Capitol while waving Confederate flags, carrying guns and zip ties, wounding and killing police officers, smearing the walls of the Capitol with filth, and erecting a noose and scaffold for the vice president as he fled for his life alongside Congress, all while Trump watched in satisfaction.

On returning to power, Trump used the President’s control over federal pardons to erase the charges against his supporters. That is what George Mason feared when he spoke at Virginia’s ratifying convention:

I conceive that the President ought not to have the power of pardoning, because he may frequently pardon crimes which were advised by himself. It may happen, at some future day, that he will establish a monarchy, and destroy the republic.