A quick background briefing for those too young to remember. In the 1940s and early ’50s, a school of establishment historians existed who made it their business to act as a sort of intellectual Secret Service for the American presidency. Close upon every great public rape of the Constitution by a president — for instance, when Harry Truman seized the steel mills, or when he began to wage war on North Korea and China without a declaration of war by Congress — these historians would rush into print with learned accounts of the 129 times the Constitution had been similarly raped in the past, under dire necessity and with no ill effects to the body politic — quite the contrary, actually: she never felt better in her life.
