The Republic That Stayed on Paper
Rome, Cheney, and the Modern Presidency
On November 4th, Dick Cheney, arguably the most powerful Vice President in US history, passed away. His death prompted reflection on his controversial legacy as VP where he advocated a hardline on the War on Terror, including support for the Iraq War and euphemistically labeled “enhanced interrogation techniques”. Cheney left behind a transformed presidency, pushing a broad interpretation of presidential powers in national security and foreign policy, which he felt had been inappropriately limited by Congress.
He didn’t remake the executive by changing the Constitution. He did it through emergency powers and legal interpretations that widened what a president could do without anyone else’s permission. Among the results:
The post-9/11 surveillance program approved through the Office of Legal Counsel, outside the DOJ.
The reading of the 2001 declaration of war against 9/11 conspirators as a global authorization for conflicts
The normalization of acting officials running entire departments without Senate confirmation.
The expansion of unilateral military action.
Cheney’s legacy raised a question that has lingered ever since: how much weight can a republic place on the presidency before its other institutions start bending around it? To see the long arc of that problem, Rome is the better guide.
There have been endless comparisons of the decline of the United States to the fall of Rome. What I’m doing is here is different. There are echoes of the way the Roman Republic transitioned into an empire in how the US presidency is accumulating power, but it is not an exact comparison. Rather, it’s something that can offer lessons for today.
The Roman historical figure who matters most is not Julius Caesar, but Augustus, the first Roman emperor. Caesar’s story is familiar, but he was only the climax of a much longer unraveling.
The power centers in the Roman republic were the Roman Senate and the two consuls, who functioned as co-executives. During times of war, one individual would be temporarily elevated to dictator with full executive power until the conflict ended. Sulla set the pattern for greater executive power in the 80s BCE when he marched on Rome, declared himself dictator, and rewrote the constitution while insisting he was saving it. The Republic resumed afterward, but it was weaker.
The Senate learned that norms were flexible if a strong leader backed your faction. Caesar took this further. In 49 BC, after conquering Gaul (modern-day France), he was ordered to relinquish his military command and return to Rome. Instead, he defied the Senate and marched on the city. He assumed control of the republic four years later.
His assassination didn’t bring the power of those institutions back. It confirmed how hollow they had become. Rome still had republican forms, but the political class no longer defended them, and slid into another civil war, this time between Mark Antony and a young Octavian, Caesar’s great-nephew and adopted heir. That conflict ended at Actium, where Octavian won the final contest for control of the state
Augustus, as Octavian renamed himself, didn’t crown himself king. He gradually consolidated power while keeping the Senate, lower offices, and the language of republican government intact. Yet all real authority flowed toward him: command of the army, control of provincial appointments, veto powers over the Senate, and the patronage networks that tied the entire elite to him. Rome still looked like a republic, and Augustus took great pains to never appear like an emporer. But this was only on the surface.
That’s the part that echoes in the modern presidency. The last 25 years created a world where the executive often acts first and explains later. Cheney’s version of the presidency was built through legal reasoning. His OLC memos justified warrantless wiretapping as part of the president’s war powers. The AUMF became a standing authorization for operations that the public barely knew about.
Now, emergency powers are being used by the Trump adminsitration to impose blanket tariffs on a whim. He has claimed the power to cancel programs and spending mandated by Congress. He has used drone strikes to kill suspected drug smugglers without due process. None of this required Congress to surrender authority on paper, it just had to stop asserting that it had it.
That tendency deepened when partisanship became the primary organizing force of politics. Congressional majorities defend or attack presidential power entirely based on party alignment, not to protect their own power. Under unified government, oversight thins; under divided government, it intensifies. The presidency grows in the gaps.
Trump made this dynamic more visible. He inherited Cheney’s legal architecture and added a personalistic layer on top of it. Instead of relying on legal rationale, he emphasized loyalty. He pressured the Justice Department to protect allies, publicly berated intelligence officials who contradicted him, used acting secretaries who answered to him more than to Congress, and pushed foreign policy through informal channels.
His ability to do this depended on partisan deference. When his party-controlled Congress, many members saw themselves not as defenders of the legislature but as supporters of their leader. That is where Rome becomes useful. Augustus didn’t need to abolish the Senate. He only needed senators to accept that their future was tied to him. They still gave speeches and held votes. They just no longer expected those votes to have a substantive impact.
When politicians treat institutions as secondary to party loyalty, executive authority expands. It doesn’t happen through coups or coronations. It happens when the political class stops insisting that its institutions matter. That brings the story back to Cheney. In his final political acts, he called Trump a unique danger, endorsed Kamala Harris, and stood behind his daughter Liz Cheney as she denounced January 6th. And yet, many of the tools Trump has used were strengthened, normalized, or justified during Cheney’s own years in office.
There is an irony in that: the man who spent a career widening the executive’s reach spent his last years alarmed by what the next generation would do with it. Rome offers the reminder. Leaders rarely predict how their reforms will be used by those who follow. And republics rarely collapse because they lose the forms of self-government. They collapse when the forms remain, but the substance has disappeared.