Executive power: President Trump (or Cruz) will have a phone and a pen too

Or, angels and ministers of grace defend us, President Trump. Last week, the civically illiterate reality-television grotesque declared before a meeting of a policemen’s union that one of his first acts in office would be to issue an executive order mandating capital punishment for anybody convicted of murdering a police officer. Never mind that the president has no such power and that Trump doesn’t seem to understand the difference between state and federal law; we have so quickly accustomed ourselves to believing that anything that sounds good to us is right and proper (“constitutional” in 2015 anno Domini means “I like it”) that no one other than a few persnickety constitutionalists (that suspicious foreigner Charles C. W. Cooke leaps to mind) even bothered to note how nuts Trump’s promise is. In this, as in many things, Trump resembles Barack Obama and the Clinton mob, who have been, it bears remembering, his traditional political allies.

Our susceptibility to this sort of demagoguery isn’t Barack Obama’s fault — it’s our fault, a failure of citizenship among Americans. There are (and long have been) stirrings of that kind of sentiment in some parts of the populist Right, but those vices generally are kept in check by conservatives’ practically scriptural regard for the Constitution. The Left has no such fetters upon its worst tendencies. Progressives since Woodrow Wilson have regarded the Constitution, and the order that it represents, as a hindrance to the rational, scientific management of society by heavily armed experts. If that is how you see the world, then of course the Bill of Rights, like the state of Pennsylvania, is just one more thing that gets in your way when you’re trying to get to where you want to be. Of course you can jail people for their political beliefs. Of course the president should supersede Congress.