King Charles reminds Congress that US president is subject to checks and balances | David Adler

The irony of the moment could not have been lost on members of Congress. Lawmakers convened in a historic, joint session and heard an English King, on April 28, on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, invoke the majesty of Magna Carta as a stern and much-needed reminder for the nation’s legislators that, in the long sweep of Anglo-American legal history, executive power has been subject to checks and balances, ever since King John, in 1215, accepted the demands of the Barons at Runnymede. For many, there is fear that the 800-year-old Magna Carta, justly viewed as the “Tree of Liberty” for Anglo-American rights and freedoms, a bulwark against executive tyranny, and what Sir Edward Coke described as “such a Fellow that he has no Sovereign,” has disappeared into the mists of time. King Charles III, the second British monarch to address Congress, was seemingly reassuring Americans that that need not be the fate of checks and balances as a constitutional restraint on presidential power.

In his address, King Charles observed that the “U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society has calculated that Magna Carta is cited in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.” Magna Carta declared that all within the English kingdom, including the King himself, was subject to the law of the land and guaranteed due process of law, trial by jury and various fundamental rights. Its vitality remains essential to American Constitutionalism.

In 1776, the Continental Congress besieged King George III with a lengthy list of grievances in various petitions and, ultimately, the Declaration of Independence. The grievances cited the king’s failure to assent to the laws and Constitution of England, his willful violation of colonists rights, his efforts to render the military independent of and superior to civil power, and cutting off trade with foreign nations, as well as attempts to render judges dependent on his will alone and obstruction of justice, among other repeated usurpations and injuries. For America’s founders, these grievances were sufficient to abandon diplomatic efforts at reconciliation with England and marked a turning point in the history of the British Empire and the nascent movement to create an American republic.

In one form or another, these grievances and others similar in tone, tenor and offense, have been advanced by millions of Americans against President Trump, whose steady usurpations of power reveal a contempt for the Constitution, the rule of law and the Bill of Rights. The many injuries that he has inflicted on our constitutional democracy have been aided and abetted by the feckless Republican majority in both houses of Congress, who have abdicated their constitutional duty to enforce checks and balances against Trump, despite their obligation to defend the Constitution and the expectation, as James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51, that legislative members would possess the personal and political “ambition” to fend off presidential aggrandizement of their powers. Their disregard of Magna Carta, checks and balances, separation of powers, enumeration of powers and their institutional integrity has reduced Congress to the role of spectator. Without restraints, President Trump has crushed constitutional boundaries and usurped congressional powers.

Lost in the mists of time, or at least in the memory of the majority party in Congress, is Madison’s explanation in Federalist 51 that, to prevent executive aggrandizement of power, Congress was granted “the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachments of the others.” Congressional Republicans have surrendered the institutional rights and powers that the founders believed distinguished the lawmaking branch. Perhaps King Charles’s words will remind congressional representatives that they have a solemn, and historic, duty to check the executive.