Our Declaration of Independence made it clear that it was the American desire to form a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, that we are thereby endowed with certain inalienable rights, to which the just powers of our government derived from the consent of the governed. Our Declaration stated that King George had usurped and tyrannized the peoples of America, to which a list of facts were enumerated and submitted to the Supreme Judge of the world.
Today, it must be asked, has the Presidency of the United States become the very thing that we rebelled against? Take, for instance, Franklin D. Roosevelt, our only 4-term President, who except for ill health, may have continued to run and win elections even beyond the fourth term that he won in 1944. Under FDR, far more power was centralized to the Federal Government and in particular, the Executive office, effectively taking sovereignty away from the States and the people as a whole, and instead introducing intrusive and massive bureaucracies to "help" wrest Americans from the Great Depression. The FDR legacy is a National Government that has far more power, far more control and mandates far more rules than were even conceived of in generations pass.
Our executive branch, in particular the Presidency, since the time of FDR, has seen its power concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, for instance, we have the two-term President Eisenhower, to which his Vice-President eventually became the elected two-term President Richard Nixon. President Kennedy was our youngest elected President before his life was cut short by an assassin's bullet; his younger brother had an excellent chance of becoming President before his life was too ended by an assassin in 1968, and later Ted Kennedy would try also to become President before falling short. George H.W. Bush became President, later his son George W. Bush would be elected twice as President, and his younger brother Jeb Bush is considered a possible candidate for 2016. Finally, William Clinton was a two-term President, and while his wife was unsuccessful in becoming the Democratic nominee in 2008, Hillary Clinton will probably run again for the Presidency in 2016.
At the time of our Declaration of Independence, there were numerous grievances listed against King George III, many of them sound quite familiar to us today such as:
"He has erected a multitude of New Offices"
"He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the civil power"
"For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent"
"For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury"
Long gone are the days that we were honored to have men such as George Washington, a man that refused to take the Executive office for life that refused to be king and that voluntarily resigned from both military power as well as Presidential power. Washington made it clear that the Union of the States was necessary to provide us "greater security from external danger" and warned us to "avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty."
Unfortunately, these warnings have been ignored; the President easily gets around congressional restraints or congressional oversight, by simply enacting executive orders which are often inimical to the very principles of our Republic. Additionally, the power and strength of our military has grown greater and greater to which the military-industrial complex has a vested interest in the President being all-powerful, which allows the military-industrial complex to concentrate all of their efforts, all of their guile, all of their nefarious influence, upon just one individual, who is effectively the Kingpin of their design.