King Charles draws cheers and applause with reference to ‘checks and balances’ on the power of the president in address to Congress

Two and a half centuries after America declared independence from the ‘absolute Tyranny” of his great-great-great-great-great grandfather, King Charles III used an address to the U.S. Congress to offer a subtle clapback at President Donald Trump’s often-monarchical ambitions as he hailed the separation of powers that replaced the British monarchy in the former colonies all those years ago.

Speaking to a rare joint meeting of Congress on the second day of his and Queen Camilla’s state visit to Washington, the King had members of the American legislature on their feet, clapping and cheering in response to description of the American constitutional system as part of a “great inheritance” passed down from the United Kingdom to the United States.

As he stood in the same spot where his late mother, Queen Elizabeth II, had spoken 35 years earlier, the King wryly noted that the dispute which led to the American rebellion against the Crown, over “taxation without representation,” sprung from a “shared democratic value” between both the U.S. and U.K.

He also praised the “bold and imaginative rebels” who threw off his family’s rule as having “carried forward” principles of the British enlightenment that themselves drew from the “deeper history” of English common law and the Magna Carta.

As he noted that the U.S. Supreme Court has cited that latter document over 160 times as “the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances,” the House chamber erupted into applause.

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