Clinton is a proud moderate who has championed bipartisanship and centrism since her first presidential run. “I think every piece of legislation, just about, that I ever introduced,” she said proudly in January, “had a Republican co-sponsor.” Her spokesperson later clarified what she meant to say, which is that “nearly every Republican senator” she served with co-sponsored at least one of her bills. Regardless, the point is that she can cooperate with Republicans. But today, there are very few moderate Republicans left to partner with (which isn’t always a bad thing: Third Way bipartisanship gave us the 1994 crime bill, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and the Iraq War). Why would congressional Republicans be more likely to work with Clinton, whom many consider a criminal for her handling of the Benghazi attacks and for having a private email server? To them, she’d simply be another Democratic extremist in the White House, no different from Sanders: In his third-place victory speech on Saturday night, Senator Ted Cruz referred to “Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, or whatever socialist they decide to nominate.”

The few areas where a Democratic president could make progress in Congress would involve libertarian allies in the Republican Party. Here, Sanders looks more the part of a change-maker, given his stances on reforming the criminal justice system, American drug policy, and government surveillance (although Sanders would have to do quite a bit of legwork to get Clinton-style Democrats on board with reining in the National Security Agency). Otherwise, a Democratic president will have to play nonstop defense to keep Republicans from further slashing Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, and although Sanders may not love those programs, he’s made clear that he prefers them to the alternative.

The real power of a Democratic president, as Chait rightly notes, would lie in their use of executive power. But he’s wrong about the implications of this for Clinton versus Sanders. “Those areas in which a Democratic Executive branch has no power are those in which Sanders demands aggressive action,” he writes, “and the areas in which the Executive branch still has power now are precisely those in which Sanders has the least to say.” Those areas, he says, are judicial nominations, executive authority, and foreign policy.

On this, Sanders deserves a bit more credit than Chait is willing to give him. Most liberals would agree that more progressive nominations in the judiciary are better, and Sanders would likely nominate staunch progressives, while Clinton could accept more moderate judges. Likewise, in using his executive authority, Sanders would push much farther to the left than the executive branch has been since, well, the Johnson or Roosevelt administrations. Both his judicial picks and the right use of executive power, in areas like racial justice and criminal justice reform, could radically transform the way those institutions currently operate.