When Donald Trump seemingly threatened to wipe Iran from existence last week, it was an all-hands-on-deck moment. Some Democrats in Congress called once more for passing a war powers resolution (WPR) through Congress, ideally through a veto-proof, bipartisan majority, to force an end to Trump’s war whether he likes it or not. Others, like Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), insisted a WPR “will not be enough” and that the president needed to be removed from power entirely through the Twenty-Fifth Amendment or impeachment. Still others are saying that’s not enough and that the only true solution is ensuring that a Republican Party propping Trump up in lockstep loyalty is “annihilated in the next election, and the election after that.”

In reality, none of these options is enough of a response. The chaos and rapidly growing danger of Trump’s presidency demand more fundamental changes to US foreign policy and the powers of the executive branch that go far beyond just restraining the figure of Trump or beating Republicans in elections.

We are living through the future that a chorus of civil-libertarian Cassandras warned about for years, this magazine included: that left in place, the radical expansion of presidential war powers and national security authority justified by the “war on terror” would one day fall in the hands of someone irresponsible and dangerous who would put this inordinate power toward terrible ends. The only surprising thing about Trump’s use and abuse of this executive authority is how quickly we’ve reached this nightmare scenario.

You don’t get Trump’s banishment of hundreds of men to a Salvadoran torture dungeon without George W. Bush’s use of “extraordinary rendition.” You don’t get his immigration crackdown without Bush’s rounding up of hundreds of random brown migrants to fight “terror.” And you don’t get his current efforts to crush domestic dissent without Bush’s abuse of the word “terrorism” and surveillance of Muslims and dissidents.

You don’t get Trump blowing up random boats in international waters without Barack Obama’s drone assassination program. You don’t get the abduction of former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro without the ex–constitutional law professor’s expansion of special forces raids and operations like the Osama bin Laden assassination. And you don’t get Trump’s multiple, undeclared wars against Iran without Obama simply ignoring the War Powers Act and waging undeclared regime-change war against Libya, along with decades’ worth of previous presidents playing linguistic games to redefine war in ways that didn’t require congressional authorization.

Simply removing Trump from power won’t erase these or any of the many other radical powers of the imperial presidency. All it will mean is waiting until the next dead-eyed sociopath, like Tom Cotton, gets his turn to wield them.

It wasn’t that long ago that rolling back Bush’s post-9/11 excesses was a fixture in Democratic rhetoric. Throughout the presidential primary in 2007, the leading candidates fell over themselves promising to end executive branch overreach and restore constitutional limits. Obama was one of them, fretting about how the weakening of US civil liberties had harmed “our reputation around the world” and vowing to have his attorney general “review every single executive order” issued by Bush that “undermined our Constitution or subverted our civil liberties.”

But that talk vanished as the primary contest entered 2008. That year’s Democratic platform barely even mentioned civil liberties. Once Obama won, rather than use that transcendent moment to sweep away Bush’s imperial presidency, Democrats instead accepted it as their own — in fact, they added to it in new and even more lawless ways. Sadly, this wasn’t just thanks to the elite: surveys showed that liberal voters overwhelmingly backed Obama’s often horrific use of drones, only to go back to melting down about this issue once a Republican was in the White House again.

This cycle can’t keep repeating. We cannot live through the past year or so of panic over Trump’s abuse of the imperial presidency, lamenting — just as liberal America did under Bush — that someone so reckless could have these powers at his disposal with virtually nothing to stop him, to the point that he could have decided to offhandedly nuke a country last week and kill millions, only to turn around and leave it all in place. There’s no person on Earth who can be trusted with this kind of power, least of all when there is no possible guarantee that a similarly irresponsible human being will never be elected to the US presidency again.

A future Democratic-controlled Congress should take up the job that Obama and the party’s old guard abandoned: put strict limits on the use of drones that won’t simply be alternately loosened and tightened by whichever president comes to power, explicitly outlawing “targeted killing” and any other attempt at finding a loophole for the already existing ban on assassinations; finally repeal the 2001 Authorization of the Use of Military Force that has been serially abused by presidents to fight often secret wars all over the world; end mass surveillance, whether in the form of the National Security Agency’s warrantless backdoor searches that Democrats actually expanded under Joe Biden, or in the warrantless spying that the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies now do through private data brokers; close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp that Trump is now trying to send migrants to; and embark on a twenty-first-century version of the Church Committee to investigate and lay bare national security abuses.

All of this would be a decent start to returning the president’s “national security” powers to a level approaching reason and sanity, and would help ensure the next Trump doesn’t have free rein to bomb, start wars, and go after his political enemies at will. Unfortunately, the Democratic establishment right now seems committed to simply rehashing this cycle in a few years’ time: key members of the Democratic caucus in Congress are right now en route to reauthorizing one of the most shockingly abused parts of the post–September 11 domestic spying apparatus, despite warning nonstop for a decade about Trump’s dictatorial ambitions.

If the fight for American democracy — or the fight for “No Kings,” as liberal activists have framed it — is going to have any meaning, it can’t just be narrowly focused on election rigging. It has to roll back the system that has given the US president the kind of despotic global power no monarch in human history has ever enjoyed. Otherwise, we can look forward to going through all of this again soon.