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Branch sovereign and nearly unchecked with regard to foreign policy. This was done for what seemed like good reasons at the time.

It is important to remember that the Founders lived at a time when the fastest communications traveled by horse, and invasions could come without warning from sea. The U.S. was, moreover, a fledgling democracy surrounded by monarchies and empires relentlessly and brutally bent on expansion. Empire building had been the name of the game from time immemorial, and nobody had any reason to believe that would ever change.

Accordingly, it was also a time when white Americans considered it their "manifest destiny" to control the continent and many in the political and commercial elite even hoped the U.S. would become the next great colonial power. George Washington, in fact, believed that he had helped found a new empire.

The Founders gave the Executive Branch such expansive military powers, therefore, largely because it would have been impractical to tie the President's hands with congressional debate when defense of the country or the seizure of territory might demand immediate action. Though the Constitution located the power to declare war in the Legislative Branch, the Executive Branch was given ample constitutional room to respond to the geopolitical conditions of that time.

Most importantly for the purpose of this essay, Executive Branch power helped provide the national security needed to maintain U.S. independence from foreign powers thereby keeping the People of the United States free enough to exercise their individual sovereignty within their borders.

Thankfully, the age of European empires is over. We live in a very different world today. Americans' world, in particular, is completely transformed. Instead of being an island of individual sovereignty in an ocean of despotism, we are just one democracy in a world in which despotism is becoming increasingly rare. We, moreover, have a military so dominant that U.S. taxpayers are required to spend more to fund it than the rest of the world combined spends to fund their militaries.

In this context, the idea of an external existential threat to the United States is beyond absurd. Of course that does not mean that murderous fanatics from Wyoming to Saudi Arabia are unable inflict painful or even potentially nuclear wounds, but it does mean that Executive foreign policy sovereignty is no longer the device it once was for safeguarding individual sovereignty.

On the contrary, despite a seemingly

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