Walter Bagehot

A stipulated majority of both Houses of the American Congress can overrule by stated enactment their executive; but the popular branch of our legislature can make and unmake ours.

It can choose, to effect its wishes, those who wish the same; and so its will is sure to be done.

It can ensure that its decrees shall be executed, for it, and it alone, appoints the executive; it can inflict the most severe of all penalties on neglect, for it can remove the executive.

Just as the American is the type of composite Governments, in which the supreme power is divided between many bodies and functionaries, so the English is the type of SIMPLE Constitutions, in which the ultimate power upon all questions is…

The Americans of 1787 thought they were copying the English Constitution, but they were contriving a contrast to it.

The splitting of sovereignty into many parts amounts to there being no sovereign.

The greatest moral duty ever set before a Government, and the most fearful political problem ever set before a Government, are now set before the American.

A race, too, formerly enslaved, is now at the mercy of men who hate and despise it, and those who set it free are bound to give it a fair chance for new life.

The most difficult of problems is how to change late foes into free friends.

They feared that it would generate tyranny; George III. had been a tyrant to them, and come what might, they would not make a George III.

The practical arguments and the legal disquisitions in America are often like those of trustees carrying out a misdrawn will--the sense of what they mean is good, but it can never be worked out fully or defended simply, so hampered is it…

The consequence is that the most obvious evils cannot be quickly remedied; that the most absurd fictions must be framed to evade the plain sense of mischievous clauses; that a clumsy working and curious technicality mark the politics of a…

Against the united will of the American PEOPLE a President would of course be impotent; such is the genius of the place and nation that he would never think of it.

But the fact remains that the President has now, by precedent and decision, a mighty power to continue a war without the consent of Congress, and perhaps against its wish.

In truth money was wanted in the late war, and the administration got it in the readiest way; and the nation, glad not to be more taxed, wholly approved of it.

The authors of the Constitution doubtless intended that Congress should be able to control the American executive as our Parliament controls ours.

Again, the Congress declares war, but they would find it very difficult, according to the recent construction of their laws, to compel the President to make a peace.

The sovereignty therefore for the greatest international questions is in a different part of the State altogether from any common administrative or legislative question.

One most important part of administration is international policy, and the supreme authority here is not in the President, still less in the House of Representatives, but in the Senate.

The American Constitution has a special contrivance for varying the supreme legislative authority in different cases, and dividing the administrative authority from it in all cases.

One means of unity the Constitution does give: the President can veto laws he does not like.

The Congress rules the law, but the President rules the administration.

When the State Governments are not thus loved, they vanish as the little Italian and the little German potentates vanished; no federation is needed; a single central Government rules all.

It must concede much to the State Governments, for it is indebted to them for motive power: they are the Governments which the people voluntarily obey.

At the beginning of every league the separate States are the old Governments which attract and keep the love and loyalty of the people; the Federal Government is a useful thing, but new and unattractive.