The Presidency, Congress and Separation of Powers

SOME EIGHTY YEARS have elapsed since the publication of that remarkable series of essays collectively entitled The English Constitution, in which Walter Bagehot first clearly revealed the operation of the contemporary British political Bagehot's capital achievement, of which he was not unaware, was his successful cutting away of the underbrush of romantic, or what he termed literary, interpretations of Britain's Constitution, thereby revealing the actual mechanism of what he then, and others since, have called the cabinet system. Though not unmindful of the nuances of that system attributable to the British monarchy and to other so-called dignified institutions, Bagehot made it clear that the efficient secret of the existing Constitution was the close union, the nearly complete fusion, of the executive and legislative powers.1 This fusion, he insisted, made for a simpler, more expeditious and better system of government than any that had been tried before

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