Conservatives & con-servatives

Afew years ago, Sen. Ted Cruz railed against supposed abuses of power by the nation’s chief executive, saying nothing “is more dangerous than the President’s persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat.”

Sen. Lindsay Graham referred to one executive order on immigration as “a tremendous presidential overreach.”

Sen. Ron Johnson said that by signing an edict that seemed to disregard the will of Congress, the President acted “without legal authority."

Sen. Ben Sasse called the President’s “pen and a phone theory of governance” “unconstitutional and abhorrent to the American system.”

Sen. Mitch McConnell said “Imposing his will unilaterally may seem tempting, it may serve him politically in the short run, but he knows it will make an already broken system even more broken… and he knows this is not how democracy works.”

All these strident Republican critics of President Obama’s alleged overreaches and many more wilted Thursday in the face of an assertion of unilateral executive authority by President Trump that is orders of magnitude more brazen and more dangerous.

In the end, 12 responsible Senate Republicans joined all 47 Democrats Thursday to rebuke Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the border empowering him to obtain border wall funding that Congress had explicitly rejected.

We thank them for standing by their principles. But with the President ready to wield his veto pen, with a critical mass of Republicans behind him, the party he leads has already been defined by abandoning them.