In the eighteenth century or the twenty-first, no large nation can flourish without some kind of executive authority. For Hamilton’s reasons, that authority needs to be powerful. At the same time, the executive is, by far, the most dangerous of the three branches, because it can do so much, for better or for ill, in such a short time.4 As the framing generation saw it, there are inextricable links among the creation of a powerful presidency, the four-year term, electoral control, and the power of impeachment. You can’t allow the first without the latter three.
