by Amal Zadok
The ghosts of the Founders would recoil at the spectacle unfolding in the early decades of the twenty-first century — an executive branch swollen beyond the imagination of republican architects, a Congress anesthetized by cowardice and careerism, and a citizenry lulled into complacency by spectacle instead of civic engagement. Were Thomas Jefferson and James Madison permitted to return from the quietude of Monticello and Montpelier, they would witness what they had most dreaded: the rebirth not of a republic, but of an empire cloaked in constitutional ashes.
Ray McGovern’s recent warning of an “imperial president” deploying United States Marines off the coasts of Venezuela and Nigeria without congressional mandate would confirm every foreboding penned in the summer of 1798, when Madison’s quill bled resistance to executive aggression. His Report on the Virginia Resolutions was not mere partisan reply; it was an ethical barricade against monarchical usurpation. To behold, then, a contemporary President — Donald J. Trump — amassing forces abroad without the explicit consent of Congress would elicit from the founders neither surprise nor silence. Rather, it would summon a thunderous appeal to first principles.
Jefferson, whose humanist radicalism was tempered by historical realism, wrote in 1798 that “the concentrating these powers in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government.” The pattern has repeated with mathematical precision. Congress, once hailed as the jealous guardian of the purse and of war-making authority, now abdicates — permitting presidents to wage war by rhetorical sleight of hand: “protective deployments,” “preemptive operations,” “authorized force under prior resolutions.” Each euphemism is a chisel against the marble of Article I. In Jeffersonian eyes, such linguistic deceptions are the ruin of republican virtue, for they substitute obedience for deliberation and flattery for freedom.
Madison knew — with prophetic lucidity — that “the executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it.” Trump’s interventions, framed as defense of “American interests” or “Christian communities abroad,” display that very tendency. Under his stewardship, the War Powers Resolution has become as ornamental as a parchment in a museum; constitutional texts linger, yet the animating spirit has fled. Madison would argue that this decay is not accidental but structural — derived from the inertia of legislative timidity. Congress once debated whether the Republic would fight; now it debates how to fund its unending fights. The mechanics of empire have replaced the morality of consent.
It is not enough to ascribe this transformation to one man or one administration. Jefferson and Madison, had they observed the evolution of executive prerogative through Lincoln, Wilson, Truman, Bush, and Obama, would describe Trump not as an anomaly but as culmination. Every protector of the Constitution who refused to challenge prior encroachments became an accomplice to today’s executive impunity. When McGovern laments the absence of “winter soldiers in Congress,” he echoes the same despair that Madison voiced when warning that liberty dies not by sudden assassination but by quiet surrender.
Thus, this indictment is not merely political — it is ontological. The Republic as envisioned by its founders cannot coexist with permanent war. In a nation where military deployments proceed without formal declarations, the body politic ceases to be sovereign. Madison would recall the foundational covenant: that the right to declare war rests solely with the representatives of the people, because it is the people who bleed. Jefferson, scholar of human frailty, would add that once citizens tolerate ruler’s wars as abstractions on screens or slogans on flags, they cease to be citizens; they revert to subjects.
Trump’s defenders might reply that the executive must act swiftly to protect American lives or global stability. Both Founders would reject the false dichotomy between safety and law. “A free people must be ever awake,” Jefferson would write, “lest by their own carelessness they invite the chains they fear.” Madison, ever the architect of durable liberty, would remind that the Constitution was framed not to facilitate convenience but to impose restraint — restraint upon power, especially the power most apt to excess.
To invoke patriotism as justification for unilateral war is to dress ambition in virtue. It is the oldest deceit known to republics. Jefferson’s voice would roll across the centuries like a warning bell: the executive power is a fire; it can warm the home or engulf it. Only Congress, as the embodiment of multiplicity and debate, can regulate that flame. To forfeit this duty in the name of loyalty to one man or one moment is to enthrone Caesar anew.
McGovern’s call — that the people must “make sure their congresspeople realize they can’t have impunity” — would resonate deeply in the Founders’ philosophy. They did not build mechanisms of civic virtue upon trust in rulers, but upon vigilance from the governed. “Eternal vigilance,” Jefferson wrote, “is the price of liberty.” Today, that vigilance demands confronting a political culture that measures patriotism by applause and power by headlines. The true patriot, in Jefferson’s republic, is the one who resists the imperial presidency, not the one who kneels before it.
The indictment, therefore, is written not in ink but in principle. Madison and Jefferson would summon the public from passivity to protest — to restore Congress as the locus of constitutional will, and the citizen as its beating heart. They would denounce as treachery any silence before executive wars launched without declaration. History has already composed the sentence; it awaits only the verdict.
If the Republic is to be renewed, it will not be by presidents invoking providence or fear, but by citizens recovering courage. For if Congress remains inert and the people inertial, the fatal prophecy Madison foresaw — that “the accumulation of all powers in the same hands” marks not governance, but tyranny — would be fulfilled. To escape that destiny, the example set by Jefferson and Madison suggests what is needed: that all people, not just Americans, recognize that constitutional liberty is not merely inherited, but must be actively defended wherever the specter of imperial government appears.
References
Jefferson, T. (1798). Draft of the Kentucky Resolutions. Retrieved from
Madison, J. (1798). Report on the Virginia Resolutions. Retrieved from
McGovern, R. (2025). Interview on Judge Napolitano Show: The Imperial Presidency and Congress’s Abdication of War Powers. Retrieved from
Wood, G. S. (1992). The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage.
Bailyn, B. (1992). The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Fisher, L. (2012). Presidential War Power. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
Meacham, J. (2020). The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels. New York: Random House.
©️2025 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.
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