Tea at Trianon: The President You Elected Can Finally Run the Government You Voted For

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, June 30, 2026

The President You Elected Can Finally Run the Government You Voted For

From Alexander Muse at The Enterprise:

Today the Supreme Court did something rare. It admitted a mistake that had stood for ninety-one years, and it corrected it. In Trump v. Slaughter, a 6-3 majority overruled Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the 1935 decision that allowed Congress to wall off the commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission from the President who is supposed to direct them. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the Court, did not nibble at the edges of that old precedent. He buried it. “If anything more is left of Humphrey’s,” he wrote, “we overrule it.” The sentence is worth pausing on, because finality of that kind is unusual from a Court that prizes its own continuity. The Chief Justice was telling the country that a structural error had at last been set right.
To see why this is restoration rather than revolution, begin where the framers began, with a single sentence. Article II opens by vesting “the executive Power” in a President, and it later commands that he “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Read those two clauses together and a simple question follows. If a President is charged with seeing that the laws are faithfully executed, what happens when the officers actually executing those laws defy him, or simply ignore him, and he cannot remove them? The answer is that the duty becomes a fiction. A man held responsible for an outcome he cannot control is not truly responsible at all. The framers understood this, which is why they did not scatter the executive power among boards and commissions. They concentrated it in one person who could be watched, praised, blamed, and ultimately voted out.
Alexander Hamilton made the point with characteristic bluntness in Federalist No. 70, a passage the majority quotes today. A “plurality in the executive,” Hamilton warned, not only weakens government but “tends to conceal faults and destroy responsibility.” Consider what he is describing. When power is divided among many hands, and something goes wrong, each hand points to another. The citizen who has been harmed cannot find the person to hold accountable, because accountability has been diluted to the point of disappearance. Hamilton thought this the great vice of committee government, and he designed the presidency precisely to avoid it. A single executive cannot pass the buck, because there is no one to pass it to. (Read more.)