Mark Helprin, pictured, is an American-Israeli novelist, journalist, conservative commentator, and is a Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. Helprin is also the author of a column that appeared in the May 27, 2025, edition of The Wall Street Journal. Helprin's column was titled, "A Good Republic Is Hard To Keep." For those who did not major in American history, that title references what Benjamin Franklin is said to have told people who asked him, as he exited the Constitutional Convention, "what have we got?" Franklin's answer was as follows: "A republic, if you can keep it."
As I read Helprin's commentary in The Journal, I was immediately reminded of the blog posting I published yesterday, "Governed By Experts, Not Citizens." I think Franklin would likely agree with Roger Berkowitz about the current state of American government, and would not much appreciate the transfer of real political power from citizens to "experts."
I am providing a full copy of the Helprin article at the bottom of this blog posting. The line I liked best? It's a line that references how our current president is relating to the Congress, and how Congress is relating to our current president:
A sheepish congressional majority behaves like a battered wife.
Let's not be sheepish, people! Congress has the power to put our current president in his place, and we have the ability to make them do that!
oooOOOooo
Upon exiting the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked, “Well, doctor, what have we got?” His answer, “A republic, if you can keep it,” is a challenge to this day.
On Jan. 6, 2021, a mob incited by President Donald Trump smashed its way into the U.S. Capitol and threatened to hang Vice President Mike Pence should he not halt certification of an election no credible evidence has ever suggested the president didn’t lose. Before the vice president fulfilled his constitutional duty, when he was subject to the president’s blandishments to rig the results, a young Marine said to Mr. Pence, “You took the same oath I did. Anything else is bulls—.”
As colloquial and concise as they were, those words deserve to remain in memory. Defense of the Constitution and adherence to the law were the questions not only on Jan. 6, they are woven inextricably into the history of the republic. Each time, we have met the test, but the questions never cease to arise afresh.
John Adams’s Alien and Sedition Acts; Andrew Jackson’s apocryphal but expressive “John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it”; Woodrow Wilson’s Espionage and Sedition Acts; Franklin Roosevelt’s internments and his machinations to control the Supreme Court; Barack Obama’s pen and phone; Joe Biden’s royal forgiveness of debt; even Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, and, unbelievably, similar intentions of late—whatever the merits of a particular policy, to intend its establishment outside constitutional limitations is to flirt with tyranny.
No doubt all presidents have been tempted to achieve their goals by slashing the Gordian Knot. For a time, such simplicity and boldness can work. Nonetheless, bypassing the puzzle, Alexander failed to solve it, and went on to tyrannical conquests that soon collapsed upon themselves.
Constitutional lapses and depredations have seemed unrelenting, and not only since January. Though the current administration may be unique in bloviating its transgressions, it is hardly alone in abandoning constitutional restraint in favor of its exigencies. As if everyone has lost the track of governing justly, both parties traduce the Constitution—on one hand the metastasized and unchecked administrative state, and on the other DOGE’s cruel joy in throwing out the baby with the bath water; the hurricane of because-I-said-so executive orders; proposals to pack the Supreme Court (from left and from the right—wait for it); defiance of federal supremacy in immigration, matched by instances of egregious federal abuse; the enforcement of racial quotas and ends; the wielding of presidential powers to persecute political opponents and, astonishingly, to further personal financial interests; the tolerance, and commission, of crime; reflexive attacks upon the judicial branch; presidential musings on a third term; and flavoring political disputation with the prose of assassins.
One could collect a list of grievances with the same rhythm if not the same weight as Jefferson’s indictments in the Declaration of Independence. But these would have to be directed not at a distant king across a cold sea, or one faulted president or another, but in mind of a sovereign people’s lack of supervision in granting agency and approval to elected officials high and low who depart from the principles of the Founding and the discipline and design of the Constitution.
The ideal equilibrium among the branches of government should vary no more than the gentle lapping of lake waters, and is prescribed in detail in the Constitution. One need not resort to close consultation to see the present imbalance, and that the drift dangerously favors the executive. As Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography, you know it when you see it.
Imbalance exists when a sheepish congressional majority behaves like a battered wife; when judges legislate and executive agencies judge; and when courts inconvenience the executive or the Congress and what follows are threats to impeach or otherwise bind judges rather than appeal on the merits or graciously accept defeat so as not to challenge the constitutional order with every setback. Because the Constitution provides precisely the tools with which to restore balances and check excesses, there should be no problem.
But there is a problem. The more blinded by battle left and right become, the more they resemble one another, meeting, as history shows, in many varieties of destruction. Despite claiming allegiance to the Constitution, modern progressives reject it as an outdated impediment to efficient government. Reeling with the intoxication of ephemeral victory, the populist right has now joined the left, just as it has in protectionism and the left’s long tradition of appeasing Russia. (Other than hypnosis, what can explain why Mr. Trump, the golden hippopotamus of Mar-a-Lago, gives sway to Vladimir Putin’s every wish?) Although it seems that progressives always have a plan and populists are incapable of anything but improvisation, both are to constitutionalism as drunkenness is to sobriety. They feed on their own momentum and enchantments until there is little difference between them and what once was dear to both is destroyed.
The sole force that can counter this is the restoration of fidelity to the principles of natural right as they were expressed with preternatural grace in the Declaration of Independence and then codified in the Constitution. These can roll off the tongue sometimes quite beautifully, for they have been seared into the American soul in war, sacrifice, defeat, and triumph—“that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,” government with the consent of the governed, freedom of speech, equality under the law, the limited grant of powers from the people to the government rather than from the government to the people, the independence of the judiciary, the sanctity of the individual. We have never long failed these principles, and they have never failed us.
Policies can make or break a nation it is true, but so can how we govern and live. Hewing assiduously to law and principle, and thus, when necessary, forsaking temporary advantage, isn’t to endanger sovereignty and survival but to preserve them. That has been the test since the Founding. But thus far, absent correction and following in the footsteps of its immediate predecessors, the current administration, failing splendidly almost every day, is betraying even its best intentions.
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