When reflecting on the principal difference between the British and American constitutional system, Justice James Iredell of North Carolina noted that ‘‘The king of Britain is not only commander-in-chief of the land and naval forces, but has power, in time of war, to raise fleets and armies. He also has the power to declare war.’’ By contrast, ‘‘the President has not the power to declare war by his authority, nor that of raising fleets or armies. These powers are vested in other hands’’ (The President Who Would Not Be King, p. 89). According to the American jurist Michael McConnell, Iredell’s exposition of the presidential powers ‘‘far surpasses anything in The Federalist’’ and is consistent with his own view of the restricted role of the executive in American political culture. In his opinion, ‘‘The principal device of the constitutional framers was to allocate large swathes of constitutional power to Congress, rather than the President, and to require advance congressional authorization and approval for many of the most significant powers of the state, such as taxation and coercion’’ (The President Who Would Not Be King, p. 351).
The reason for this procedure has once more to do with the ratifiers' intelligent fear that sinful men might seek self-aggrandizement over considerations directly related to national interest. Their review of the annals of history and the pages of newspapers revealed that it was not uncommon for monarchs to chase after what Federalist John Jay condemned as a ‘‘thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans’’ (The Cult of the Presidency, p. 29).
Writing in 1793, James Madison asserted that this vainglory in war produced a political condition in which ‘‘the strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or genial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty for peace’’ (The Cult of the Presidency, p. 30). Madison was not the first to observe that human passions often undermined political goods such as peace and freedom. Religiously-minded politicians such as Samuel Adams had noted that in all nations the selfish instincts of human beings had ‘‘combined the worst passions of the human heart and the worst projects of the human mind in league against the liberties of mankind’’ (The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, p. 60).