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Unit 7: Constitutional Structure: Executive

provide security. The latter makes use of legalized lawlessness, that is, of retaliatory or Notes
anticipatoryactions which would be illegal if they were not performed by the police. These are punitive
actions, sometimes done so impressively as to suggest that the purpose of law is mainly to punish.
Such action also permits or even requires the executive to gather in his person the power that enabled
the first lawgiver to awe his unsettled subjects, and to exude the fearsomeness of a being who makes
and executes his own law, as if he were an angry god. One would not suggest too muchin saying that
executive pride smacks of tyr anny, so radically does it enlarge upon the instrumental executive.
It is all very well to speak sententiously of a govenment of laws, not of men, but to an executive that
may be so much unsupported assertion of legislative pride. Legislators may fervently believe that to
change behavior it is enough to pass a law. But laws that are mere executed, the executive must be
given some or most or all of the legislative pride. By this view, a government of laws or all of the
legislative pride. By this view, a government of laws addressed to men is reducible to a government
of men.
Thus, recognizing executive pride, we find in the American Constitution that taking care to exeute
the laws faithfully is only one of the imposed on the president, for the performance of which he is
given several powers. Among them are powers that are neither executive in nature (the veto of
legislation) nor subordinate (commander-in-chief of the army and navy). Moreover, he is vested
with “the executive power,” which according to Hamilton’s famous argument, has a nature of its
own, bounded only by necessily, that is not exhausted by the enumerated powers; and he takes an
oath to faithfully execute not the laws but his office. But, for Kant, not only is the executive represented
as a minor premise, but he is also described—with the covert, corrective realism that is as usual with
Kant as his theoretical extremise—as a moral person of coordinate power with the other two powers.
We see that the real, practical, informal executive is, if not a tyrant, far more powerful than the
supposed, theoretical, formal executive.
He is also quicker and more masterful. In today’s political science the term “decision-making” is
sometimes applied indiscriminately to all governmental actions or toall actouns whatever, conveying
a sense that all decisions are similar and none of them particularly “executive.” It is admitted, however,
that decisions sometimes follow one another in a series, and soone hears of “the legislative process,”
“the judicial process,” and “the administrative process.” But one does not hear of “the executive
process.” In actual usage, as distinguished from intent, executive decision-making retains a decisive
aura and seems distinct from the general, workaday, reassuring process of ordinary “decision-
making.”

7.1 British King and Prime Minister

Monarchy

The office of the monarch constitutes, what Walter Bagehot says, the ‘dignified executive’. However,
the classical defence of the Victorian writer has undergone a great change. The fact that there is
‘crowned republic’ in Britain illustrates that the king “has been sold to democracy.” And yet the
existence of the king or queen is a matter of some confusion to the students of comparative governments
belonging to a non-English country. The formal duties of a President of any other country of the
world are easy to understand as they are stated in the constitution. Different is the case of Britain
where the prerogatives of the monarch are nowhere written in an explicit form and no act of Parliament
has been formally made to give them a clear expression if circumstances so required. Owing to this,
the prerogative “remains a vague twilight area of residual powers, some of which, like the treaty
power, are considerable.”
King and Crown: The constitutional history of Britain represents a steady decline of the body politic in
the sphere of Monarchy and the House of Lords. Before the Glorious Revolution of 1688 there was
hardly any difference between the King and Crown as the power of the state was vested in the
wielder of Crown. However, the growing process of democratization brought about a major change
and the monarch was gradually compelled to transfer part of his powers to the other institutions like
the Cabinet and the House of Commons. The result has been a twofold executive - powerful head of

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