While I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at the soaring platitudes of his insurgent presidential campaign—Yes We Can!—it was at least reassuring that Barack was reputedly a constitutional scholar. Progressives had spent years railing against Dubya’s “Imperial Presidency,” insisting that the White House had seized far too much power from Congress and it was high time to rein in the executive branch.

Yet such concerns abruptly vanished with Obama’s resounding victory in 2008, from engineering the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to be as removed as possible from accountability to, even more cynically, suddenly imposing “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” (DACA) after frequently acknowledging that such executive action would be blatantly illegal.

DACA in particular marked a disturbing sea change, not just definitively poisoning the well for the sort of balanced compromise between generosity and border security that a bipartisan majority of Americans wanted, but calling into question the executive’s basic fealty to statute. What did legislation really mean anymore if administrative state politicos would pick and choose whatever they cared to enforce?

At Columbia Law, most of the faculty were actively gloating.