An Office Fit for a King

During the COVID-19 pandemic Prime Minister Boris Johnson regularly delivered public addresses to the nation from behind a podium with British flags in the background, an image that looked more at home in an episode of The West Wing than a traditional Downing Street meeting room. More recently, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak took part in a “town hall” style televised event seemingly based on such campaign events that occur regularly during American primary and presidential election cycles.

But despite the increased Americanization of British politics and British political campaigning the American presidency and US politics more broadly strike the British as quite alien. The president, unlike the British prime minister, represents a country and a government. The scale of the pomp and circumstance associated with the American president is only seen in the UK when royalty is involved. The president’s car—nicknamed “The Beast”—struggles to turn around in Downing Street. I was starkly reminded of the differences between the British prime minister and the American president myself one day when I, a London-​based think tank intern, was taking the tube and looked up from my phone to see Prime Minister David Cameron standing opposite me reading a newspaper. Having lived in the Washington, D.C. area for a decade I can confidently say that I never saw Barack Obama or Donald Trump on the metro.

To many in Britain the American presidency might seem ostentatious and powerful, but it comes across as both hamstrung and all-​commanding at once, capable of directing the most formidable military power in history with few meaningful restraints while at the same time constitutionally incapable of making significant policy changes on some of the United States’s most pressing policy issues. There is an irony with the alien nature of the American president in the UK, given that the British are obsessed with American politics and that the American presidency—which was designed to be a restrained office—looks increasingly like the more powerful British monarchs found in history books.

Perhaps it is because the United States and the United Kingdom are “two countries divided by a common language” that many people in the UK feel as if there is a lower barrier to entry into American political news and culture compared to similar news from closer countries. Despite being on the doorstep of Europe and across an ocean from the United States, many people in the UK would find it easier to tell you the name of the governor of California or the American Secretary of State than identify the prime minister of Spain or France. Westminster is full of civil servants and policy analysts who watch American elections more closely than they watch local elections in the four nations that make up their country, let alone elections in Europe.

Whichever presidential candidate wins this year’s election, which millions of Britons will watch, the winner will occupy an office that looks closer to that of a British monarch than what the Founding generation envisioned. Writing in Federalist 69, Alexander Hamilton defended the new Constitution’s treatment of the presidency, highlighting how different the president would be from the British monarchy. Hamilton noted that unlike the British king, who had absolute authority to reject a bill from Parliament and make treaties of his own accord with foreign powers, the president’s veto of legislation can be overridden by Congress if there is sufficient support for the bill, and treaties negotiated by the president must be ratified by the Senate.

Hamilton’s comparison between the proposed presidency and the king are the most stark in his discussion of the executive and the military: “The President will have only the occasional command of such part of the militia of the nation, as by legislative provision may be called into the actual service of the union. The king of Great Britain and the governor of New York, have at all times the entire command of all the militia within their several jurisdictions.” Hamilton goes on to note that although the president as commander in chief of the army and navy may have authority that is “nominally the same” as that of the king, the Constitution would ensure that the president acts merely as a first general and admiral, with the powers to raise armies, maintain navies, and declare war being reserved to Congress. Hamilton was hardly alone in believing that the executive had to be restrained. James Madison wrote: “[I]t has grown into an axiom that the executive is the department of power most distinguished by its propensity to war: hence it is the practice of all states, in proportion as they are free, to disarm this propensity of its influence.”

As anyone with a passing knowledge of American history will be able to tell you, the American presidency has grown in power since the ratification of the Constitution in 1788. The United States has not declared a war since the Second World War, and what authorizations for military force that Congress has passed have done little to restrain the president’s power to wage war. Perhaps the most notable example is President Barack Obama using the Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001, passed in response to the Al Qaeda 9/11 attacks, to bomb the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) despite the fact that ISIS did not exist in 2001 and was later in conflict with Al Qaeda itself.

The presidency has also exceeded its role in domestic policy, overseeing a vast collection of alphabet soup agencies and other regulatory departments that govern almost every aspect of Americans’ day-​to-​day lives. And while the Framers of the Constitution may have sought to ensure that it was Congress, not the president, who set budgets and allocated funds, presidents can undertake their own pet projects as long as there is an emergency at hand. When Congress refused to fund President Trump’s border wall, he used emergency powers to fund it. More recently, President Biden used emergency powers to fund a student loan cancellation program, a move estimated to cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

British observers are used to government’s carrying out expensive projects, but it should be notable to Americans that their presidency looks familiar to the British in the most ironic of ways. After all, the Declaration of Independence is a litany of complaints against Britain’s George III, some of which could be levelled against every modern president: “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance” comes to mind as one noteworthy example.

And yet, despite the growth of the power and scope of the American presidency the United States remains one of the world’s most secure bedrocks of liberal democracy. According to the Cato Institute’s most recent Human Freedom Index, the United States and the UK are joint 17th in the list of countries ranked by economic and civil liberty. The top ten include countries with a range of different governance styles: republics such as Ireland, Estonia, and Switzerland as well as constitutional monarchies such as Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Luxembourg. An alien anthropologist visiting Earth tasked with studying which human governance structures are best at preserving freedom would have a tough time concluding that republics with supposedly restrained executives outperform constitutional monarchies.

If republics do not seem to be a necessary condition for a free society and the American presidency is too powerful for it to be placed back in the small box it came from, what are Americans to think on Presidents’ Day? A pessimist might look at the current American political landscape and conclude that the American presidency is a dangerous office destined to grow as Americans, ever more distrustful of their political opponents, demand swift and decisive action to achieve short-​term policy goals. Such an outcome would appear to the British as sad but unsurprising given recent American history. It would also be disappointing to those who believe in the experiment that is the United States, a country with a government designed to be limited and protective of individual liberty.

But there is another conclusion you could draw. A more optimistic view is that the mutual and growing distrust between America’s political tribes results in both sides seeking to ensure that their opponents do not inherit powerful weapons that can be turned on them. Such an outcome would result in a weaker executive. Sadly, for now, this looks like the least likely of the two outcomes.