The Only Christ We Deserve

As this is a Constitution Day talk, I have a confession to make. Two years ago I wrote that we had bidden farewell to our old constitution and now had a very different one, one of strong presidentialism. The separation of powers no longer binds an American president, who can make and unmake laws without the consent of Congress, spend trillions of government dollars, and take us to war without the consent of Congress. He is rex quondam, rex futurus—the once and future king.

I had hoped for some reaction from political theorists. Mostly that didn’t much happen. They had taken their theories from The Big Lebowski. “Yeah, well, you know, that’s just like your opinion, man.”

But it wasn’t just opinion. With the most sophisticated of econometric techniques, I had examined 89 presidential regimes and 50 parliamentary countries over a 39-year period, to see how they ranking on measures of political freedom. And what I found was that parliamentary regimes are freer than presidential ones, where freedom is lost to all-powerful presidents.

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