08/07/25
8/7/2025Do elected leaders grow to covet great power once in office, or do they assume power already coveting it? And what about those who resist the siren song of power, and instead choose to serve their constituents?
Most Americans familiar with politics are also familiar with British Lord Acton’s famous aphorism: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Historically, American leaders offer checkered evidence as to whether Acton was right or not. On that question, our elected officials run the gamut.
Probably no President showed greater willingness to relinquish power than our first, George Washington. The Father of His Country ran successfully for two successive four-year terms as a war hero, winning 100 percent of the electoral votes each time. There’s no doubt he could have been elected for a third term, and a strong likelihood for more than that. Several contemporaries urged him to choose that course.
But Washington preferred to return to private life, having little desire to continue as the most powerful official in the land. He longed for a quiet life on his Mount Vernon estate, he regretted the young nation’s early descent into bitter partisanship, and he believed strongly that attempting to prolong his presidency would appear headstrong and prideful in the public eye.
This last reason may have been his strongest. Washington knew, and shared, the fear that most Americans held of a monarchical leader arising to seize power in the newly formed nation. Refusing a third term demonstrated his commitment to civilian government, with power handed from leader to leader.
In that regard Washington, then and now, invited comparison to Cincinnatus, the Fifth Century B.C. rich patrician leader whom the Roman Republic called to be a king-like dictator to lead the Roman military against a threatening enemy force. Cincinnatus and his men defeated the enemy in 16 days, whereupon he, despite his position at the head of the government and the army, returned instead to his farming estate outside Rome.
Washington is a classic example of a leader whose head was not turned by power. He stands in stark contrast to our current President, who urged his supporters to descend on the nation’s capitol in January 6, 2021, to try to prevent the congressional electoral vote count that officially recognized Joe Biden’s victory over him.
Donald Trump’s entire adult career manifests his hunger for power and the follower obedience that accompanies it, both before he entered politics and afterward. And that reality places an onus on members of the coequal congressional branch of the American government: to whom, or what, is their deepest loyalty owed? The President? Their political party? Their campaign funders? Their constituents? The Constitution?
No Congressman or Congresswoman is immune to the political demands of their office. They ran as members of their party (except for the blessed few who achieve electoral success as independents), and they therefore owe a certain degree of allegiance to that institution. And their contributors large and small, who finance their campaigns, deserve some consideration as well.
But history, and the present Washington scene, are rife with examples of members of Congress who will do about anything their President, or their alpha congressional leader, orders them to do. For them, party and its leaders take precedence, even over their own best judgment. Vote tallies on important congressional issues sadly indicate where, for most of them, their deepest loyalties lie.
With both houses of Congress so evenly split between the parties, the times cry out for a few members who choose their constituents and the Constitution above the pressures of their party or the President.
It’s sad, for instance, to realize that virtually all of Trump’s nominees to the Cabinet in his current term were confirmed by the narrowly Republican Senate despite the undeniable fact that some nominees have little or no experience or familiarity with the crucial duties of their office.
Or that only two House Republicans, and three in the Senate, voted against Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill which a nonpartisan congressional budget office says will raise the federal debt by several trillion dollars over the next decade while depriving millions of people of Medicaid benefits and making permanent lower taxes for billionaires.
Or that the Republican congressional majorities so far have given Trump free rein to impose tariffs of various levels on most nations, the cost of which will be paid by American businesses and consumers tantamount to a nationwide sales tax.
I don’t believe for a minute that all those Republicans actually buy the need or the desirability of those actions. No doubt some do. But there are surely enough who voted against their conscience in each case to have prevented enactment had they followed their better natures.
The demand for political and/or presidential loyalty is not limited to Republicans, of course. President Franklin Roosevelt, for example, tried to “purge” Southern Democratic Senators who opposed him by supporting their liberal Democratic opponents in the 1938 congressional elections. All but one won reelection despite FDR’s hostility.
Today, it would take only a handful of Republican members of Congress, who would doubtless face certain presidential retribution, primary opposition, and scary personal threats to themselves and their families, to do right by their conscience and their constituents, at least until their next election. That courage would halt the most egregious of Trump’s overreaches for at least awhile.
What’s more important, the good of the nation or the retention of a congress member’s tenure in office? What did they run for, to serve their constituents or to enjoy the perquisites of congressional power?
We need a few more like Cincinnatus. ♦
