We have to go back to Obama and what Obama did rhetorically. The Pandora’s box he opened when Republicans took control of the House, and then particularly when they had control of the House and the Senate, and he said, “We can’t wait. We can’t wait for legislation to pass. We can’t wait for the good, ordinary workings of divided government to find consensus we can all agree on. I have a phone and a pen and I’m gonna do whatever I have to do to do the ‘right thing.’”
And then, having said that he did not have the power to legalize the Dreamers and the people under DACA…he then announced that he did. And he unilaterally did, and then once again, the system worked in the sense the courts struck it down. And struck down other unconstitutional efforts by the Obama administration in the second term.
But Trump’s assault on the Constitution, Trump’s language about the Constitution, that we have to go beyond the Constitution. You know, you can’t steal an election, so we have to suspend the Constitution because they’re stealing the election. All of that.
I don’t think that rhetoric would have existed absent Obama breaching some kind of blood/brain barrier relating to how we talk about ordinary working order and the Constitution was not bridgeable.
The idea that you could do something patently unconstitutional because it was “right” and then maybe you’d have some hail Mary and some court would say, “Yeah, go ahead.” That’s not something that people did until 2013. And now we got a Governor of New Mexico saying, “I don’t think the Constitution applies to my state. It’s not absolute.”
— John Podhoretz in Commentary Magazine Podcast ‘They’re Coming After the Constitution’
