Is the president a king?

My latest explores key episodes in the development of the Imperial Presidency

Very few Americans today seem to have a good sense of the amount of power our system of government has concentrated in the executive branch. As I discuss in the article, the executive branch even claims the power to kill American citizens anywhere in the world without charges or due process of law—and, importantly, it has done so. Here is a preview of my latest article for CounterPunch (this one is currently for CP+ subscribers):

The notion that the presidency has assumed monarchical power is not a new one. A longstanding discourse focused on the imperial presidency has attempted to understand the growth of the executive branch in sheer size, in unilateral power, and in apparently unquestionable sole discretion. The phrase owes its popularity to historian Arthur Schlesinger’s 1973 classic The Imperial Presidency. But the War on Terror era produced excesses of power that few could imagine when the book was published over 50 years ago.

Today, to compare a U.S. president to a king is almost certainly to understate the power and importance of American presidents relative to the old European kings. As we shall see, few kings could claim to rival today’s U.S. presidents in power both over their people and in the world abroad. While the trend toward a more powerful executive is historically deep, the years after 9/11 opened the way to an enormously strong, cutting-edge police state. The new system of government required a legal framework that would permit expansive warrantless surveillance and unchecked, perhaps uncheckable, government secrecy.