The way back lies through Congress, and Buckley suggests feasible reforms that it might adopt, to regain the authority and respect it has squandered.įrancis H. Constitutional amendments to redress the balance of power are extremely unlikely, and most Americans seem to have accepted, and even welcomed, Crown government.

What we have is what Founder George Mason called an “elective monarchy,” which he thought would be worse than the real thing. The country began in a revolt against one king, and today we see the dawn of a new kind of monarchy. What we have instead is what Buckley calls Crown the rule of an all-powerful president. Sadly, that’s not the government we have today. What they expected was a country in which Congress would dominate the government, and in which the president would play a much smaller role. Finally, what we think of as the Constitution, with its separation of powers, was not what the Founders had in mind. And it’s not the Constitution that made it free, since parliamentary regimes are generally freer than presidential ones. America isn’t the freest country around, according to the think tanks that study these things. Most Americans believe that this country uniquely protects liberty, that it does so because of its Constitution, and that for this our thanks must go to the Founders, at their Convention in Philadelphia in 1787.į. This remarkable book shatters just about every myth surrounding American government, the Constitution, and the Founding Fathers, and offers the clearest warning about the alarming rise of one-man rule in the age of Obama.

The once and future king book