The Declaration of Independence didn’t just declare a breach between the American colonies and Britain. It also laid out concrete principles ranging from the profound and timeless notion that the purpose of government is to preserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, down to more granular and prosaic considerations about how a free people ought to be governed.
The Founders’ complaints against King George III could be read as a brief “how not to govern” guide, and those complaints helped shape our Constitution 13 years later. Today, 242 years after the Declaration, we are closer than is comfortable to replicating George’s offenses that Thomas Jefferson outlined in the Declaration of Independence.
Specifically, the Declaration attacked centralization of power, disenfranchisement of the colonies, and executive power grabs from elected legislators.
It objects that George “refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” In other words, the king wouldn’t approve laws decided by the colonies. The result was that Americans decided how they wished to be governed but were not allowed to put their wishes into effect.
Jefferson and the Founding Fathers also complained that “he has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.” As revenge for resisting him, the king made the Massachusetts, South Carolina, and Virginia legislatures meet far from their normal locations and important documents.
They accused George of “taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments.” Two years earlier, Parliament revoked the charter for the colonial government of Massachusetts, centralizing power over the colony in London. There are other similar complaints, and in most of these instances, the king was ignoring the will of colonial legislatures.
Given all that frustration, it’s no surprise that the Constitution created Congress, the branch most responsive to the electorate, as the supreme branch of government. Only Congress can create laws. If the executive vetoes a bill, Congress can override it. Congress controls the purse strings. Congress even has final say on every presidential election and the power to remove the president.
In recent decades, however, the president has increasingly ignored the will of Congress, and his bureaucrats have legislated without authority or oversight from the actual legislative branch.
For decades under both political parties, the executive has expanded its own power. This has partly been because lawmakers, worried about re-election, have shirked their duty to take difficult decisions. But it’s also true that presidents all have kingly ambitions, which is why the Constitution put Congress at the top. Still, kingly ambitions have been winning, and the presidency has usurped power from the legislature.
Former President Barack Obama, for instance, frequently and arrogantly rewrote his own law, Obamacare, after Congress had passed it. His executive actions on immigration, likewise, amounted to legislating from the executive, according to his own arguments.
President Trump’s extraordinary unilateral tariffs have been legal, but that’s because Congress unwisely ceded vast power to the executive on this matter.
Congress, therefore, deserves a portion of blame. It has been complicit because it has handed far too much authority to the executive and deferred to the executive too often on issues that deserve congressional scrutiny. Democrats in Congress, for instance, created the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection deliberately to be unaccountable to Congress.
Both parties deserve blame for giving the executive free rein to fight wars without congressional authorization. While congressional action authorized use of military force against Iraq in 2002 and against terrorists who aided the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, these authorizations have been used far too broadly to justify more recent military actions in places such as Syria and Yemen.
To preserve the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, the federal government needs to rebalance power among the branches of government. The executive needs to be limited to enforcing laws that Congress writes, rather than torturing legal logic to write laws that Congress never intended.
Congress needs to relearn the wisdom and the courage of the Founders and get back to work. Legislators must legislate and genuinely oversee the executive, regardless of which party is in the White House.
