A few months ago, before President Obama delayed his plan to extend deportation protections to more unauthorized immigrants, a group of conservative opinion journalists—New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, most prominently—weighed in on the idea in unequivocal terms.

This would be Caesarism, they declared. A step into the lawless void.

It all sounded incredibly plausible, in no small part because Obama framed his own objective as a response to the fact that Congress hadn't passed a law he wanted Congress to pass. That Obama also insisted, on multiple occasions, that only Congress could solve the deportation problem, further bolstered the right's case.

But it turns out that the laws on the books actually don’t say what you might think they say. Other presidents have discovered this, too. And since nobody wants to write a “maybe I should’ve asked some lawyers first” mea culpa column, they shifted the debate from the terrain of laws to the murkier terrain of political precedent, norms, and procedure.

There are obviously things within the realm of the law that would violate important norms in obvious ways. If purple-state Republicans used their discretion to divvy up electoral votes between presidential candidates in a way that ensured Republicans could regularly win the White House without winning the popular vote, it would be both totally legal and insanely undemocratic.