The Tea Party movement in the early 2010s was, at its core, a lot of things — some noble, some embarrassing, and some that involved people dressed as colonial militia members in an Applebee’s parking lot shouting about the Federal Reserve. But beneath the tricorn hats and misspelled protest signs was a genuine constitutional anxiety: that President Barack Obama was accumulating executive power in ways that should frighten anyone who had read past the preamble.
When Obama left office, The New York Times noted he had “sought to reshape the nation with a sweeping assertion of executive authority and a canon of regulations that have inserted the United States government more deeply into American life.”
The authors observed Obama had resorted to “bureaucratic bulldozing,” and “once Mr. Obama got the taste for it, he pursued his executive power without apology, and in ways that will shape the presidency for decades to come.”
Now we have “No Kings,” and the wheel has turned. The same energy that had conservatives dressing up as founding fathers 16 years ago is now manifesting as progressive protesters holding signs with crowns crossed out in red. And, again, there is a real constitutional anxiety underneath it — there is no doubt President Donald Trump’s behavior is genuinely more lawless, more contemptuous of institutional constraints, and more brazenly self-interested than what Obama or Biden were doing. But it also has deep roots in the administrations of Democratic presidents of yore.
So both sides are right about the problem. They are just selectively right about it.
Obama’s use of executive action to, for example, grant effective legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants through DACA was not a law passed by Congress — it was a president deciding that certain laws simply would not be enforced against certain people. His administration’s aggressive use of “guidance documents” to effectively rewrite federal regulations without going through the notice-and-comment process that actual rulemaking requires was a deliberate end run around legislative accountability. Tea Partiers screamed about this constantly, and then proceeded to nominate and elect Trump, who immediately demonstrated that the executive pen Obama had wielded could also be used to make policy more to their liking.
But here is the problem that the No Kings movement has yet to answer: if consolidating power in the executive branch is the definition of “king-like” behavior, why is the proposed Democratic remedy more consolidation?
Both sides are right about the problem. They are just selectively right about it.
President Joe Biden used executive action to cancel hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan debt — a massive transfer of wealth that Congress never authorized, affecting tens of millions of people — enacted entirely by presidential decree. When the Supreme Court told him he couldn’t do this, his supporters treated the ruling as an outrage rather than as the constitutional system functioning as designed. The logic for the past three presidents has been uniform: Congress won’t act, so the president must. That is not a constitutional principle. It is an argument for whatever executive you happen to prefer.
The problem is that presidential power is a ratchet. Each turn is very difficult to reverse. When Obama normalized the use of DACA-style executive action, he didn’t create a policy — he created a template. Trump used that template. Biden used it again. And now, as Democrats begin assembling their 2028 primary field, the candidates positioned to lead the party are not running on restoring congressional authority. They will run on promising to do more of everything, faster, by executive action, because the legislative process is slow and the opposition is obstructionist and there are problems to solve right now.
They will promise, in other words, to be better kings.
Take, for instance, Gavin Newsom, who, as governor of California, issued executive orders banning gasoline cars, regulating AI data centers to protect the state’s workers, and directing cities to clean up homeless encampments. The man knows his way around a unilateral order.
This is the trap that the No Kings energy is in danger of walking directly into. The movement’s implicit theory seems to be that executive power is acceptable when deployed for acceptable ends — forgiving debt, protecting immigrants, expanding benefits — and becomes tyrannical only when deployed by someone with different values. This is not a principle. This is a preference dressed up as a principle, which is exactly what the Tea Party was doing when they decided Obama’s phone and pen were an imperial scepter (though conservatives stayed mostly silent as Bush expanded surveillance and presidential war powers in the years prior).
If No Kings is going to be more than a slogan — if it is going to be the genuine constitutional reckoning that this moment arguably requires — it has to mean something beyond “no kings who disagree with me.” It has to mean reducing the power of the office itself, restoring congressional authority, and accepting that the policies you want might have to actually pass through the legislature to become law.
Otherwise, you’re not opposing the throne. You’re just auditioning for it.
Christian Schneider
Christian Schneider writes the Anti-Knowledge newsletter. He is a co-host of the podcast "Wasn't That Special: 50 Years of SNL."