Noah Feldman, Columnist

The Last Check on Presidential Power: We the People

Neither the courts nor Congress have stopped Donald Trump’s assault on the Constitution. Can we?

November 2, 2020 at 11:30 AM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

The last check on presidential power.
Photographer: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

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After four years of President Donald Trump’s assault on the Constitution, it comes down to this. The courts have done what they could to limit the damage; the House impeached him; and the Senate let him get away with it. Now all that remains is the final check provided by the Constitution: a vote of the people.

James Madison would have seen this coming. While the Constitution was being ratified, he argued that its checks and balances would preserve the liberty that the document was supposed to enshrine. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” he wrote in the most famous of the Federalist Papers.