“Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

With that brief sentence, former President Richard Nixon shocked a nation into confronting the corrupt mindset of a man driven from office amidst the Watergate scandal.

But today, we don’t need to wait for the president to leave office to hear his unfiltered aspiration for unchecked power. Just check out his Twitter feed.

“As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong?” President Donald Trump stated in a tweet Monday morning.

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The Department of Justice has said otherwise.

“Under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case, the President cannot pardon himself,” the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel wrote. That memo was issued four days before Nixon resigned.

Once again, nearly a half-century later, the United States must grapple with a chief executive for whom rule of law is only a mere obstacle. During his short tenure in the White House, Trump has demonstrated a brazen disregard for every norm, every value, of a representative republic.

George Washington imagined the presidency as a first among equals. Trump seems to act as if he has no equal. Foreign funds and taxpayers dollars filter into his private company from which he never divested. Power continues to concentrate in the White House while key positions within the State Department go unfilled. Pardons are issued without the involvement of the Department of Justice. The mere mention of his power being checked elicits digital tirades, 280-characters at a time.

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Meanwhile, a cowed and impotent Congress goes about its business as if this growing storm is little more than a summer drizzle.

“The president openly declares he is above the law,” CNN analyst Ryan Lizza observed Monday morning. “This statement alone would have led to calls for impeachment in a previous era.”

Now all its gets is representatives trying to avoid reporters’ questions.

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It falls on voters, Democrats and Republicans alike, to confront their representatives in the run up to the November election and ask whether they believe the president is above the law.

Texans have dealt with profligate pardoners before. At the turn of the century, then-Gov. James E. “Pa” Ferguson became notorious for handing out clemency at an unprecedented rate — allegedly in exchange for land, cash and other bribes. Pa was eventually impeached and removed from office.

Texans then knew that we must hold politicians to account for their use of power. Let us hope that we haven’t forgotten.