The Reins of Good Princes

Locke buried the most important observation in the Two Treatises in a subordinate clause: "the reigns of good princes have been always most dangerous to the liberties of their people."

He means it structurally, not rhetorically. Here's the mechanism. A good prince uses prerogative — acts outside or against the letter of law for the public good. The people, observing that the tendency is genuinely good, don't contest it. Over time, "what had been done only for the good of the people was [claimed as] a right in them to do, for the harm of the people, if they so pleased." The successor arrives, inherits the record of expanded discretion, and interprets it as entitlement rather than trust. The precedent of virtue becomes the infrastructure of tyranny.

The trap isn't that good rulers are secretly bad. The trap is that constitutions bind the vicious more than the virtuous, so every time a virtuous ruler bends a rule for good reasons, they donate a tool to whoever comes next.

This is a precise description of what's been happening to the War Powers Act since 1973. Each president who has committed forces without a declaration of war — and each Congress that has let the sixty-day clock expire without consequence — has expanded the prerogative of the executive in foreign military affairs. FDR's broad wartime powers, Truman's "police action" in Korea, LBJ's Gulf of Tonkin, Reagan's Lebanon, Clinton's Kosovo, both Bushes' Gulf wars, Obama's Libya. None of these were uniformly cynical exercises of raw power. Most were defended as good-faith emergency actions for the public interest. Many probably were.

But the constitutional logic is indifferent to motivation. Every time the clock passed without enforcement, the prerogative expanded. Every time the courts declined jurisdiction as a "political question," the gap widened. The argument Hegseth made last week — "ceasefire pauses the clock" — is not an invention. It's an inheritance. It's what happens when you let the good-prince exemption accumulate for fifty years.

Locke identifies the remediation correctly too, and it's uncomfortable: "declared limitations of prerogative were by the people found necessary in cases which they and their ancestors had left, in the utmost latitude." The constraint doesn't emerge until the abuse becomes visible. Before that, the latitude is "tacitly allowed" because the current holder is trusted.

This is why constitutional erosion is so hard to arrest mid-process. The moment to constrain prerogative is during the good prince's reign, when there's no obvious harm being done and no political constituency for limiting a power that appears to be working. The moment after — when the bad prince is already in the seat and the tools are live — it's too late for anything but what Locke calls "appeal to heaven," which is his seventeenth-century phrase for revolution as constitutional mechanism.

Six War Powers votes failed. Both sixty-day deadlines passed. No court case filed. The prerogative is exercised. What Locke is describing is a state in which "there can be no judge on earth" — not because there's no judge available, but because the institutional structure that would select the judge (Congress) is itself unable to compel enforcement, and the courts have repeatedly declined to enter the question.

There's something clarifying about reading Locke while watching this happen. He's not describing an unusual failure. He's describing the ordinary operation of prerogative over time. The good-prince problem isn't a bug in the system — it's load-bearing. Governments need flexibility. Emergencies are real. The executive has to act when legislatures are slow. Every constitutional theorist who's tried to eliminate prerogative entirely has produced either paralysis or a different kind of unaccountable power.

What Locke is really saying is that constitutions are not self-enforcing. They're sustained by something prior to the written rules — by the willingness of people to contest encroachment when they see it, even when current encroachments seem benign. The hard part isn't stopping the bad prince. The hard part is being willing to constrain the good one.

"For all the power the government has, being only for the good of the society, as it ought not to be arbitrary and at pleasure, so it ought to be exercised by established and promulgated laws." The "ought" is doing everything. There is no mechanism. There is only the disposition.

Which means the real question, watching the sixth vote fail 47-50, is not whether the current administration is acting in good or bad faith. It's whether future administrations will have a precedent to claim. They will. The good-prince problem isn't about this prince.

Locke thought the remedy was the people retaining "a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative, when they find the legislative act contrary to the trust reposed in them." Democracy as corrective mechanism. Which works — slowly, painfully, imperfectly — when the legislature is the problem. It's less obvious what the corrective mechanism is when the legislature is the part that can't enforce, and the executive is the part that can.

"Prerogative is nothing but the power of doing public good without a rule."

He meant that as a definition. He might as well have written it as a warning.