It's past time for Congress to curb executive overreach.

The Founders did not intend to create a serial king; their goal was the opposite. James Madison and his cohort had a specific intent: to separate the powers of the state so that autocracy would die in its crib. By removing checks and ceding authority, the legislature has allowed too much power to accumulate in the hands of one individual. The season has come for the people's representatives to take that power back.

Be afraid

Think of the Presidential Alert as a kind of Amber Alert. It warns that a sexual predator is on the loose in the West Wing.

It's good to be the king...

Having one, less so.

The Founders intended the legislature to be preeminent, with the President largely an administrator (and the Supreme Court a referee), but over time Congress has ceded far too many of its responsibilities and far too much of its power to the executive, until we have reached the point where what we have is a sort of serial monarch, one chosen -- because of Citizens United and other electoral corruptions -- by the nobles, like a Polish King. And although we still have a more or less (mostly less) functioning legislature, our king has vastly more power than any constitutional monarch among his contemporaries.

How we make our way back to truly representative democracy is the most central political question of our times.

quote unquote: Adlai Stevenson

In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take. -- Adlai Stevenson