In Common Sense, published in January 1776, Thomas Paine wrote that in a free country, “the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.” He wasn’t just rejecting a monarch, he was proposing what should replace one: not a different person with the same kind of power, but a system where law itself sits in the seat. That standard is worth keeping in mind as we watch power consolidate in the presidency today, regardless of who holds the office.
Search the Constitution for the phrase “unitary executive.” You won’t find it. Article II, Section 1 says only that “the executive Power shall be vested in a President,” eight words stretched by a legal theory barely forty years old into a claim that the president can control or remove anyone exercising executive authority, for any reason or none.
The same Article II binds the president to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” not executed as he alone sees fit, but faithfully, in keeping with what Congress wrote. That clause sits right next to the language the unitary executive theory leans on, and it points the other way: toward an executive who carries out the legislature’s will. Proponents argue faithful execution requires control over subordinates; critics argue the Founders paired power with a duty of fidelity, not personal discretion, a real disagreement that Paine’s question cuts through: does this arrangement keep the law as king, or install a person in its place?
The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Trump v. Slaughter stripped removal protections from the FTC and, by that logic, potentially two dozen other agencies. Project 2025 made the case for exactly this kind of power. To supporters, that may feel like a win. But the ruling enables the office, not the party. The next president, regardless of party, inherits the same power to fire FTC commissioners, FCC members, and NLRB board members. A tool built to let one administration purge an agency is, by construction, a tool the next administration uses the same way. This is the danger James Madison named in Federalist No. 51: ambition must counteract ambition, because no branch can be trusted to police itself once it holds unchecked power.
Elections aren’t a blank check. A president who wins an election has a mandate to lead the executive branch, not a mandate to govern as though Congress, the courts, and the other half of the country no longer have a claim on policy. That’s why Congress’s work matters: legislating is slow because it forces buy-in, and a law requires another law to unmake it. An executive order requires only a new administration and a different pen. Governing primarily by decree feels efficient, but it produces policy with no durability, regulation nobody can plan around, rewritten every time power changes hands.
This isn’t a one-party habit. In 2023, the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s plan to cancel $430 billion in student debt, ruling 6-3 in Biden v. Nebraska that the Secretary of Education had no statutory authority to enact a program that sweeping without explicit congressional approval. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the Biden Administration had taken a narrow power to adjust loan terms and used it to invent an entirely new $430 billion program. Nebraska’s attorney general called the ruling “a timely reminder that the President is no king,” and said the administration needed to “work with, and not around, Congress.” That’s the same argument we make here about Slaughter, just aimed at the other party’s president.
If the argument is right, it’s right regardless of whose name is on the order, and it also means respecting work already done. Every administration inherits agencies and settlements built through years of negotiation among people no longer in the room. Some of that deserves revisiting through legitimate process. Treating it as disposable the moment power changes hands treats government as a series of resets rather than one continuous project. Sustainable constitutional government asks something harder than winning. It asks us to support rules we’d accept under a president we didn’t vote for, and to prefer legislation’s slow legitimacy over the fast fragility of leadership by executive order. Our representatives should treat both their predecessors’ and successors’ work as part of the same unfinished project. Paine’s principle, and the one a Republican attorney general invoked against a Democratic president, was the same: no one gets to be king, including whoever sits in the Oval Office next.
