June 26, 2003 - We are approaching the celebration of our Independence from the British Crown and the birth of a new democratic Republic. When with the assistance of the French king we achieved the dissolution we had sought through long years of blood and sacrifice we set about crafting a new order of government building upon the individual rights and liberties of British subjects, first by collegial consensus and finally with the first national exercise to create a contractual government embodied in the provisions of the Constitution of the United States. We drew upon our shared experience and tried to insure that the people of the new nation would be protected against the oppressions their fathers, their grandfathers and their great-grandfathers had suffered at the hands of a monarchy.

The English monarchy had the power to declare war at the King’s prerogative, leaving the Parliament only with the power of the purse to restrain the monarch from excessive foreign adventures that bled the country of young men and the provinces of money. The King had the unrestrained power to appoint officers over the people who could be removed only by impeachment and conviction by the hereditary House of Lords, itself controlled by the King’s power to confer nobility. The courts to which the subject might look for protection of liberty were themselves creatures of the King with Judges whose tenure was dependent upon the Kings Largess and continued favor.

At the onset of the revolution a party of Boston men had journeyed to Europe to offer a North American throne to a no longer young Bonnie Prince Charlie. Then in his 50s and afflicted with that myriad of ills attendant upon his addiction to alcohol he found that twenty-five years had robbed him of the stomach to lead another revolt against his Hanoverian cousins. He rejected the proposition and when the fight was over we rejected the idea of a hereditary monarchy as well as the idea of an elected monarch.

Mindful of the tendency of an executive power to assert prerogatives that the people had not intended; the Constitution created a careful balance of the power of government distributing authority among three co-equal branches. The legislative power of the purse was augmented by vesting the power to make war in the Congress and by making the power of appointment a prerogative shared between the President and the Senate. The Judiciary was made independent with judges enjoying lifetime tenure and no judicial power vested in the Presidency save the power to pardon. The People of the United States would not be subjected to oppression by a parallel system of prerogative courts that had afflicted the mother country. The Star Chamber would not be re-constituted on an American shore.

In the last half of the 20th Century and at a dizzyingly increasing pace in the first years of the 21st that finely crafted balance has been upset. Today, on the President’s prerogative alone a defendant may be removed from the Federal Courts and subjected to the 21st Century equivalent of the Star Chamber. Congress has abdicated its responsibility to restrain war making. The independence of the Judiciary has been made subordinate to political agendas. It has been a bipartisan effort that brings credit to no one.