“I have the right to do anything I want to do,” President Donald Trump said of the prospect of deploying federal troops into cities. “I’m the President of the United States.”

Trump’s radical assertion of absolute power — by now, a familiar, though indefensible, refrain — during a three-and-a-half-hour cabinet meeting on Aug. 26, finds no footing in our constitutional architecture. There is, in the text of the Constitution, no mention of unlimited presidential power. There was, in the Constitutional Convention, no train of discussion and no flirtation with the doctrine, which delegates regarded as repugnant to republicanism; indeed, there was not a scintilla of evidence in the debates in Philadelphia to support his outrageous claim. No delegate, moreover, to any of the various state ratify

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