The Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in America.

• Author: Somin, Ilya
• Position: Book review

The Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in America

By Frank Buckley

New York: Encounter Books, 2014.

Pp. xii, 398. $27.99 hardcover.

Frank Buckley is a Canadian-born academic who has long been a leading legal scholar in the United States. Despite (or perhaps because of) living in America for many years, he has not lost his affection for queen and parliament. In The Once and Future King, he offers a penetrating analysis of the dangerous growth of executive power in three predominantly English-speaking democracies: Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. Executives in all three nations have increased their authority at the expense of the legislature in recent decades. But Buckley contends that Britain and Canada's parliamentary regimes are better able to limit the dangers of executive aggrandizement than America's separation-of-powers system.

Buckley's book has many strengths and undoubtedly qualifies as a major contribution to the debate over comparative constitutional design. On some key issues, however, he overrates the benefits of parliamentary systems and undervalues those of presidentialism.

Perhaps the strongest part of the book is the first half, where Buckley traces the growth of executive power in all three nations. The rise of the "imperial presidency" in the United States is a much discussed phenomenon. Less well known is the increasing concentration of power in the hands of the prime minister and his or her staff in the British and Canadian political systems.

Buckley argues that executive aggrandizement is rooted in the fundamental nature of modern government. Because the state has taken on numerous complex functions, it requires a large bureaucracy, which is more readily controlled by the executive than by the legislature. In addition, the concentration of power in the hands of the executive is fostered by the inherent advantages of a unitary leader relative to a multimember legislature and by the rise of the modern media, which tends to focus attention on a single charismatic and powerful leader rather than on relatively faceless members of Congress or parliament. This part of Buckley's book also doubles as a fascinating comparative history of the three countries' constitutional development. In an insightful analysis of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, he shows that many of the Founding Fathers, including James Madison, actually wanted a more tightly constrained president selected by Congress rather than the separate executive that ultimately emerged. Ironically, the parliamentary executive established by the framers of the Canadian political system in 1867 may in some ways be closer to Madison's vision than that which was created in the United States.

Although the growth of executive power is a common feature of all three nations' governments, Buckley argues that parliamentary systems have coped with the resulting challenges better than America's separation-of-powers system has. Because a parliamentary majority can remove a prime minister from...