Substantively, however, the imperial presidency continues to metastasize. The presidency, the Cato Institute’s Gene Healy has written, “keeps shrinking, but — with an executive branch of some 2.1 million civilian employees and counting — it never gets any smaller.” As a branch of government, it has grown under Republicans and Democrats alike. Some curbs were put on the office under Richard Nixon because of Watergate, and because Democrats don’t like it when Republican presidents behave like Democratic ones.

“Those who tried to warn us back at the beginning of the New Deal of the dangers of one-man rule that lay ahead on the path we were taking toward strong, centralized government may not have been so wrong,” Democratic Senator Alan Cranston of California remarked in 1973 during Watergate.

That’s a lesson Democrats would do well to ponder, because they are rhetorically giving Obama license to do whatever he likes. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D.,Texas) recently declared that the priority for her and her comrades should be to draft executive orders — not laws — for Obama to sign. Representative Xavier Becerra (D., Calif.) suggested on Fox News Sunday that the president could rewrite Obamacare at whim because the Constitution gives him the power to act during a national security threat. And of course, Senator Harry Reid (D., Nev.) blew up the filibuster rules for appointees.