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... The antifederalists admired Washington, but they knew that his example would not endure. An antifederalist writing under the pseudonym An Old Whig said it well. “So far is it from its being improbable that the man who shall hereafter be in a situation to make the attempt to perpetuate his own power, should want the virtues of General Washington,” he wrote, “that it is perhaps a chance of one hundred millions to one that the next age will not furnish an example of so disinterested a use of great power.”

We are in the next age, and we are governed by a man who shuns Washington’s example and grasps for power with both hands.

There is a constitutional answer to this national challenge. We can — at long last — heed the warnings of the antifederalists, and we can do it simply enough, by changing the first sentence of Article II. Instead of declaring, “The executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States of America,” it should read, “A president of the United States of America shall execute laws passed by Congress.”

This simple change would have sweeping implications. It would remove the president as the chief executive of the nation and turn him or her into a steward of the laws passed through the democratic process. In this formulation, the Department of Defense and the Department of Education wouldn’t be the president’s agencies; they would be his or hers to run according to the rules and guidelines established by Congress.

No longer would the president possess a free-standing “executive power” to grant him the authority that Trump seeks, including the discretion to decide which laws to enforce and which laws to ignore.

Revising the executive vesting clause isn’t the only necessary or prudent constitutional change (the pardon power should be revisited, for example), but it would make explicit what the Constitution makes implicit: Congress is the supreme branch, and at a stroke the Constitution would no longer enable, in Cato’s formulation, an ambitious president to “ruin his country.”

This new presidency wouldn’t be powerless. The president would still command the armed forces, for example, and he or she would still nominate judges and make treaties.

Nor would this amendment permit Congress to run amok. The president would still possess the veto. Courts would still possess the right of judicial review.
But the balance of power would shift, and the populist project of maximum executive authority would come to an end, and only another amendment would make it rise again.

If history is any indication, unless the next president has Washingtonian character and foresight, then it is quite likely that he or she will imitate Trump and wield all the power that he or she can, though in service of that person’s ends rather than Trump’s. In fact, in the absence of congressional action, it will take a Trumpian exercise of power to simply undo all the worst excesses of his second term.