The law that power forgets...

The glacier gave way, and a wall of ice, rock, and mud descended through valleys along the Tibet–Nepal border. Settlements were engulfed, bridges destroyed, and lives swept away. Scientists have long warned that warming is destabilising Himalayan glaciers and slopes, and have called for better monitoring, early-warning systems, and cross-border sharing of hydrological data.
The tragedy should not be treated as proof of any single negligence. It is, rather, an image of our age: immense human capability expanding within natural systems whose warnings we acknowledge intellectually but resist politically, economically, and psychologically. It is a consequence of arrogance and ignorance.
Human behaviour moves in cycles. Hardship teaches restraint; restraint creates stability; stability enables prosperity; prosperity produces power. Power then encourages the belief that the limits which made it possible have been conquered. Caution begins to look timid; warnings become impediments.
The problem is not an absence of warnings. It is that warnings compete poorly with immediate advantage. The rewards of acceleration are concentrated and visible; the costs are delayed, dispersed, and often transferred to others. Each participant has a rational reason to continue while the system proceeds irrationally towards danger.
The same cycle is visible in political power, even where it is surrounded by a supposedly preventative constitutional architecture.
The American system was founded upon distrust of concentration. James Madison’s answer was structural: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” Congress, the presidency, the courts, the states, and the electorate would prevent authority from gathering in one place. The design was ingenious, but its safeguards were never automatic. Executive action is immediate and concentrated; legislative resistance is slow and collective.
The Supreme Court widened this vulnerability in Trump vs United States in 2024, recognising absolute criminal immunity for exercises of a president’s core constitutional powers and presumptive immunity for other official acts. The judgement enlarged the distance between presidential power and personal accountability.
President Donald Trump did not create the systemic weaknesses observed today in the American system. He revealed how they can combine. The more troubling conclusion is that another president could inherit the same enlarged office.
Elections are therefore indispensable but insufficient. They can remove a ruler without repairing the structure that enabled overreach. Each party condemns executive excess in opposition and discovers its convenience in office. Power accumulates through a constitutional ratchet.
For that reason, Democrats should not treat winning the next election as their overriding purpose. Victory should be the means, not the destination. Replacing one personality while preserving the machinery that enabled him merely postpones the next crisis.
They should instead seek a mandate for constitutional repair that binds the next Democratic president as firmly as any Republican. Reform designed only to disable an opponent is factional strategy. Reform accepted as a restraint upon one’s own side is a constitutional principle.
Some safeguards can be restored through legislation. Emergency powers should expire unless Congress renews them. Disputes over subpoenas and executive spending require expedited judicial review. Inspectors-general, whistleblowers, and the professional civil service need stronger protection. Congress must reclaim responsibilities it has allowed to migrate to the executive.
Other principles may require constitutional entrenchment. A narrow amendment should affirm that official acts do not by themselves place a president beyond criminal responsibility; prohibit self-pardons; and require extraordinary emergency powers and unilateral military action to lapse after a defined period without congressional authorisation.
Human power must be governed by an external nomos through institutions, or an internal one, through conscience and self-restraint. When both fail, another order asserts itself. Markets correct leverage through crashes. Ecosystems correct overuse through collapse. Pathogens exploit openings created by ecological intrusion and global movement. Political systems correct accumulated grievance through rupture.
These are consequences, not moral judgements. That is precisely why human law matters. Law is civilisation's attempt to correct power before the consequence corrects it for us.
Moderation is not retreat from progress. It is the discipline that allows progress to endure.
Power will always seek expansion. The question is whether wisdom, law, and self-restraint can mature quickly enough to contain it. If we refuse to impose limits while choice remains ours, limits will eventually be imposed upon us. The deeper nomos of nature and human systems is seldom as measured as our own law might have been.