Opinion | Trump Tries on His Crown

The Constitution is not a grant of power for a king.It is, instead, a grant of authority from the sovereign people to establish a republican form of government — a representative democracy of limited and enumerated powers.And the republican character of American constitutional government is expressed in the way it divides the executive, legislative and judicial powers among separate institutions.“In the establishment of a free government,” a 19th-century Supreme Court justice, Joseph Story, observes in his “Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States,” this division “has by many been deemed a maxim of vital importance, that these powers should for ever be kept separate and distinct.” When those powers are mixed in a single individual, “such a form of government is denominated a despotism, as the whole sovereignty of the state is vested in him.”It is not, as Story continues, that the “departments of government” should have “no common link of connection or dependence, the one upon the other, in the slightest degree.” Rather, it is that “the whole power of one of these departments should not be exercised by the same hands, which possess the whole power of either of the other departments; and that such exercise of the whole would subvert the principles of a free constitution.”In our system, the executive branch cannot exercise the full power of the legislature.

It cannot act as a monarch would.The sovereign people did not imbue their power into a leviathan.

The upshot of this is that any interpretation of the Constitution that grants the president monarchical power is wrong.The structure of the Constitution precludes a royal prerogative and the ethos of American democracy forbids it.

Otherwise, the revolution was for nothing.Last week, Donald Trump proposed for nomination — to key agencies, including the Department of Defense, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice — a group of unqualified...