By Jeff Bayard | Constitutional Showdown Series
The Virginia Christian Alliance continues our Constitutional Showdown series, framed from the Christian worldview and constitutional originalism. This installment tests two executive actions against the executive power constitutional limits the Framers wrote into Article I and Article II — reading the text as written, and equipping believers for faithful citizenship.
In the last week of August, the President of the United States picked up a pen and renamed one of the Great Lakes.
He signed an order declaring that Lake Ontario would henceforth be called Lake America. Federal maps would change. Federal agencies would use the new name within thirty days. It took effect.
That same stretch of days, a federal judge blocked another of his orders — this one directing how a federal election would be run. It was not the first such block. Court after court has stopped pieces of that effort for more than a year.
So here is a question worth sitting with. The same office. The same month. The same pen. It reached for two things — and it kept one and lost the other.
Why?
Not because one judge liked him and another didn’t. You don’t have to trust the judges’ politics. You only have to read the constitutional text they were required to read. The answer is older and steadier than any judge’s politics, and once you can see it, you will see it everywhere.
It comes down to which yard the President was standing in.
The Line the Framers Drew on Purpose
Open the Constitution to Article I, where the powers of Congress are listed. Read how it starts: “All legislative Powers herein granted.” Herein granted. Then it gives a list. Congress may do these enumerated things, and the list is the fence.
Now turn to Article II, the executive. It reads differently. “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States.” No “herein granted.” No list. Just the executive power, handed to one man.
That small difference in wording is not an accident, and it is not trivial. It is the hinge on which this whole question turns.
Dr. Albert Mohler has walked his listeners through this same ground. On The Briefing, he described the administration’s strategy as an effort to “test the limits of executive authority” through a flurry of orders — and to “dare lawsuits to come.” That is a fair description of the strategy. And within the President’s own house — the executive branch he was handed to run — that authority is real and broad.
Naming a lake for federal use sits inside that house.
Here the President is not inventing a power out of thin air. Congress long ago built the machinery for federal geographic names — the statute at 43 U.S.C. §§364–364f, which runs through the Interior Department and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. The August order works through exactly that framework, and it reaches back to the same authority the President used in January 2025 to rename the Gulf of Mexico. He directs Interior. He directs the Board. They are his to direct.
Notice what the lake order does not do. Its legal reach is confined to federal usage — federal maps, agencies, contracts, documents, and communications. It does not bind New York. It does not bind Canada. It does not bind a single private citizen or company. The order itself says as much: it creates no right enforceable by anyone against the government. It changes what one government — his — writes on its own maps, and it stops there.
That is a President acting inside his yard, administering a framework Congress gave him. The fence holds because he never climbed it. Whatever you think of renaming a lake during a trade fight with Canada — and reasonable people find it odd — it is lawful, because it reaches no further than the federal government’s own paperwork.
The election order is a different thing entirely. And to see why, you have to know where the Constitution put elections.
Who Owns the Rules of Your Election
Here is the part most people have never been told.
The rules for a federal election were never handed to the President to write.
For congressional elections, the Constitution is explicit. Article I, Section 4 — the Elections Clause — assigns the “Times, Places and Manner” of electing Senators and Representatives first to the state legislatures, and gives Congress the power to make or alter those rules. Two names appear in that sentence. The states. And Congress.
The President is not one of them.
And the rest of the machinery — how voters register, how mail ballots are handled — runs on laws Congress has already passed: the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act, and others. Under Article II, the President’s job with those laws is to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” To carry them out. Not to rewrite them by order.
So when an executive order instructs the states on how to run their registration, sets a nationwide deadline for receiving ballots, and threatens to withhold federal money from states that don’t comply, it is reaching over a fence the Constitution built. The order may be well-intentioned. It may address a real problem. But it is reaching into a yard that was handed to someone else — to the states, and to Congress.
That constitutional boundary helps explain why major portions of the effort have repeatedly run into the courts. The first election order came in March 2025. In January 2026, a federal judge struck provisions of it as “inconsistent with the constitutional separation of powers.” In June, another judge permanently blocked its proof-of-citizenship requirement for the federal registration form.
Then, in March 2026, the administration issued a second election order — this one directing the Postal Service to write new rules for how mail and absentee ballots are handled. And just as the President was renaming the lake in late August, a judge blocked key parts of that Postal Service rule too.
That is the pattern worth seeing. This is not one old order still bouncing around the courts. It is the executive branch returning, a year later, with a new order — and being turned back at the same line the Constitution drew.
Same branch. Same boundary. One kind of action — naming a lake — stayed inside the executive’s own house and stood. The other kind reached into the states’ and Congress’s yard and was turned back, twice. The office did not grow or shrink. The Constitution simply drew a line, and one action was on the right side of it.
Now comes the part this series will not skip — because it lands on our own side of the aisle.
We Said This Was a Good Idea. We Still Do.
Last October, this series ran a piece defending the goal behind that election order.
We argued that federal voting belongs to citizens. The constitutional amendments protecting the franchise repeatedly speak of the voting rights of citizens — the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, Nineteenth, and Twenty-sixth all use that word. We argued that verifying citizenship is a legitimate and honest aim, and that the biblical call to honest scales — “A false balance is abomination to the LORD: but a just weight is his delight” (Proverbs 11:1) — speaks directly to the integrity of a vote.
We stand by every word of that.
So let us be plain: the goal of the election order is not the problem. Keeping non-citizens from voting is a right and reasonable aim, and a Christian has good reason to care about it.
The problem is the road.
A right goal reached by the wrong road does not arrive. When the President tries to set election rules by decree, the courts strike it down — and the cause is not advanced an inch. Worse, the striking-down becomes the headline, and the other side gets to call the whole effort lawless. The shortcut doesn’t just fail. It sets the goal back.
There is a lawful road, and it runs exactly where the Constitution said it would. Congress can act — the SAVE Act is precisely that attempt. The states can act; they run elections. That road is slower. It is also the only one that ends somewhere.
Scripture puts it cleanly: “And if a man also strive for masteries, yet is he not crowned, except he strive lawfully” (2 Timothy 2:5). The crown does not come to the one who merely wins. It comes to the one who wins within the rules of the contest. Even a righteous end must be reached by a lawful means. The rules are not an obstacle to the goal. They are how the goal becomes real and stays real.
And if a reader suspects this is special pleading — a Christian outlet going easy on a President it favors — look at the record. In 2020, this ministry made this same argument against the other side. When governors and mayors ran their COVID lockdowns by executive order, we wrote that an executive order becomes contrary to the separation of powers precisely when it reaches for powers the Constitution reserves to the legislature — that such a directive “is not law,” because it never passed a legislature.
That was the principle then, and it is the principle now. An order that stays inside the executive’s own authority is one thing; an order that reaches into a power the Constitution handed to Congress or the states is another. The test does not change with the party of the person holding the pen. That is what the command to judge without partiality (Leviticus 19:15) requires, and it is the whole reason a Christian’s constitutional witness can be trusted at all.
The Strongest Case on the Other Side
Honesty requires giving the best version of the argument against this piece — and it is a serious one.
Dr. Mohler, whose framework opened this article, does not think the President is simply lawless. Looking at the fights between this White House and the courts, he said plainly, “I think the Trump administration is right” — on the specific question of whether a single district judge should be able to bind the whole nation with one ruling. “A district court judge should not be able on a coast-to-coast basis to bind the executive branch,” he argued. That is a real problem, and it is worth its own debate. Scholars like John Yoo have argued for years that a President should have real, unbroken control of his own branch, and that decades of independent agencies have improperly diluted it. On that question — control within the executive house — they have a strong case.
But notice what that case is about. It is about the President governing his own branch. Removing his own officers. Directing his own departments. That is the yard where his authority is strongest.
Election administration was never in that yard to begin with. It is not an executive power that agencies “diluted.” The Constitution handed it to the states and to Congress in 1787. Even the most robust view of presidential power only reaches the powers the President actually has — and this was never one of them. The strongest argument for executive control proves that the President should command his own house. It says nothing about a house that was never his.
And there is a deeper reason the Framers kept election rules away from the President specifically. The Framers did not place the power to write the rules of an election in the hands of the officer whose job is to execute the laws — the very officer whose own branch’s power rises or falls with who wins. Letting the executive set the terms of the contests that decide political power is a conflict of interest the Constitution was built to prevent. Not because any one President is wicked, but because no holder of that office should control the rules of the elections around him. The separation of powers protects us from the bad President precisely by binding the good one.
What the Citizen Does
Which brings it back to your kitchen table.
Somewhere in your house is a copy of the Constitution, or a phone that can pull it up in ten seconds. The next time you read that a President — this one or the next — has “ordered” something about an election, or an agency, or a state, do the one thing almost nobody does.
Ask which yard he was standing in.
Was he directing his own branch — the departments and officers that answer to him? Then he is likely on solid ground, however much you may like or dislike the result. Was he reaching into a power the Constitution handed to Congress, or to the states, or to the courts? Then no amount of good intention makes it lawful, and the courts will likely say so.
You do not need a law degree to ask that question. You need the text and the willingness to look.
A lake got a new name this summer, and it stuck, because the President was standing in his own yard. An election order got stopped, again, because he was standing in someone else’s. The office did not change. The line did the work — the same line the Framers drew on purpose, so that no one man, however energetic, however right, could rewrite the rules of the elections around him.
The battle over that line is real, and it is not new, and it will not end this year. But our task is smaller than winning and larger than worrying. It is to read the text, ask the honest question, and hold every officer — including the ones we voted for — to the words as written.
The same God who “changeth the times and the seasons,” who “removeth kings, and setteth up kings” (Daniel 2:21), is not anxious about a lake or a ballot. And He calls His people to be, of all citizens, the most fair, the least partisan, and the hardest to fool.
Go check.
