Finally got to see the Toronto production of Hamilton: an incredible, dynamic, musical history lesson. Of the 47 songs, three belong to King George; they are played in what might best be termed, “campy,” and the audience starts laughing as soon as he appears, center stage.
George’s first song is “You’ll Be Back,” in which he predicts that the colonists will return to England and the monarchy. That proves not to be the outcome of the war, obviously, and so King George’s second song, later in the play after the British have astoundingly lost to the upstart rag-tag colonies, is titled, “What Comes Next?”
It’s a bit of a “sour grapes” response by the King. Britain lost and of course, the colonies didn’t come running back to him. Yet from his bitterness comes some wisdom about the rise and fall of empires and nations. Part way through the song George says, “I’ve got a small query for you.” And then asks, almost taunting Washington and company:
What comes next?
You've been freed
Do you know how hard it is to lead?
You're on your own
Awesome, wow!
Do you have a clue what happens now?
Oceans rise
Empires fall
It's much harder when it's all your call…
The song echoes a story about Benjamin Franklin. As he walked out of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Franklin was reportedly asked, “Well Doctor what have we got, a republic or a monarchy? The famous response was, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Like Franklin, Miranda’s King George is keenly aware of the pitfalls of government and leadership.
Almost two and a half centuries later, watching the play sparks a reassessment of the American Revolution against Britain and its experiment in democracy. After the songs, after the manic choreography, after the biography of Hamilton, the takeaway is how the American democratic republic with its two houses of Congress has fared when compared to the British monarchy whose king could levy a tea tax and rule by royal decree.
Should be a no-brainer win for the republic, right? But something called an executive order enters the picture. Executive orders are intended to get lower level things moving efficiently. Wikipedia defines them simply as, “a directive by the president of the United States that manages operations of the federal government.” Governments need efficiencies: so far, so good.
But over the years, something has happened to the executive order. It seems to have begun well enough, with George Washington signing a mere eight of them during his two terms, an average of one per year; Thomas Jefferson signing but four. However, during the course of twenty five presidents up to 1901, the count rose to a high of 185. This is a significant expansion, but nothing compared to Teddy Roosevelt signing more than a thousand such orders and Franklin Roosevelt, the all-time champ with 3,278. After Roosevelt, who admittedly had the Great Depression and WWII to contend with, things settled down and no one went above a thousand, usually far fewer, but still much more than the restraint shown by America’s earlier presidents. Donald Trump signed 220, which was still 56 fewer than Obama. The current incumbent, Joe Biden has signed 115 orders to date, which puts him on track to sign about 200 by the end of his four year term. Biden signed thirty orders in his first three days, ten of which reversed executive orders of Donald Trump.
But the numbers are only part of the story. The nature of executive orders has changed, and now encroaches on the purpose and role of Congress to make and pass laws in accordance with a representative government’s function. Executive orders might well be good, such as Lincoln’s Proclamation of Emancipation, or they might not, as Franklin Roosevelt’s Incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, but the point is that these are momentous decisions affecting American life, and they are being made by the authority of one man, the president, obviously counselled by his White House staff and State Department advisors, making for a government within the government.
In his first hundred days, President Biden’s executive orders included:
*Raising the minimum wage of federal contract workers from $10.95 to $15.00/hour
*Ended the Keystone pipeline which had been in the works for a decade.
*Halts construction of the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico.
The evaluation of these examples shouldn’t be whether or not you agree with the policy, but whether or not the president, with no regard for Congress, has the sole right to establish these policies as the law of the land in the first place.
Bypassing Congress means that American citizens have no input; the brilliant three part system of the founding fathers consisting of the legislature, executive and judicial branches, designed to provide checks and balances on the government by the government itself, thereby preventing the centralizing of power, is being eroded. The executive branch gains power bypassing the legislature through its overuse and overreach of the executive order.
And while American presidents sign executive orders tantamount to royal decrees, what is happening on the other side of the pond, as the Brits like to say? Well, May 2023, saw the Coronation of King Charles III. His role, as was his mother’s, Queen Elizabeth, before him, is largely ceremonial. The powers of King George III to tax tea in America and decree affairs of state have been stripped away. King George would, to use the old cliché, “roll over in his grave,” if he knew what happened to his monarchy.
Meanwhile, on this side of the pond, American colonists revolted against Britain to rid themselves of a tyrannical king and establish a republic lead by a president with limited powers and elected by the people. Over the arc of history, the office of the president has accumulated power while the monarchy that the colonies threw off has lost its supremacy. Would the colonists have been better off had they not revolted? The irony is just waiting for Lin-Manual Miranda to lyricize if ever he gives King George a fourth song.
It could be titled, “I Told You So!”