When President Ronald Reagan was in surgery after being shot, Al Haig, his secretary of state, went on television and announced, “I’m in charge.” This occasioned some disbelief and merriment, and not just because Haig overstepped his constitutional duties. No one is in charge in America. The constitutional system is designed to balance the elements of government perpetually in defiance of princes, physics, human nature, and historical precedent.

The founders knew their Cicero and their Livy, but they also had recent British and French cases in mind. Monarchical France epitomized despotism and “Popery,” which was Protestant shorthand for arbitrary power and clerical meddling. This attitude was overwritten when the Bourbon tyrant became the cynical savior of the American Revolution and then erased when America’s increasingly ecumenical civic nationalism made it impolite to mention the founders’ anti-Popery.