There is a constitutional crisis, but not the one many people think

There is a crisis, and it is serious. But it is not the crisis that Goodlatte or Hanson are talking about. It has nothing to do with immigration, climate change, clean air, or oil and gas. Some of the people yelping about “overreach” are just boys crying “Wolf!” Others, I fear, are themselves wolves in waiting.

Cries that one president or another has become a Caesar are a regular feature of American history. These charges, sometimes valid and sometimes silly, are inevitable because of design flaws in the system. Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, which claims to set out the president’s powers, is so sketchy that virtually no one on either side of any issue really consults its text in practical situations.

So presidents have asserted their authority, and Congresses have sought to rein it in, since the dawn of the republic. These disputes are usually settled by negotiation between the branches. That has been the pattern since 1793: Presidents assert, Congresses protest, negotiations ensue, the system muddles on. Nothing Obama has done in his six years in office comes close to the kind of assertions made by presidents like Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, or George W. Bush.