Is this true? Are we at a crisis that threatens the entire system? Do the American people face a lawless, overreaching executive rampaging through immigration and environmental policy?

There is a crisis, and it is serious. But it is not the crisis that Goodlatte or Hanson are talking about. It has nothing to do with immigration, climate change, clean air, or oil and gas. Some of the people yelping about “overreach” are just boys crying “Wolf!” Others, I fear, are themselves wolves in waiting.

Cries that one president or another has become a Caesar are a regular feature of American history. These charges, sometimes valid and sometimes silly, are inevitable because of design flaws in the system. Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, which claims to set out the president’s powers, is so sketchy that virtually no one on either side of any issue really consults its text in practical situations.

So presidents have asserted their authority, and Congresses have sought to rein it in, since the dawn of the republic. These disputes are usually settled by negotiation between the branches. That has been the pattern since 1793: Presidents assert, Congresses protest, negotiations ensue, the system muddles on. Nothing Obama has done in his six years in office comes close to the kind of assertions made by presidents like Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, or George W. Bush.

The key to assessing the relative danger is the basis for a president’s claims. Does the president assert that he has an “inherent” power to act as he sees fit, regardless of what Congress does? Some presidents (of both parties) seem to have shared the belief that, as Richard Nixon once put it, “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Most prominent among them was George W. Bush, who secretly and unilaterally suspended valid treaties, statutes, and parts of the Constitution in the exercise of his “inherent authority.”

Other presidents have asserted authority derived from statutes passed by Congress. They admitted that Congress could rescind the authority, but until it did, they insisted on their own reading of the law. Lincoln was a genius at this, and Barack Obama fits squarely in the same tradition. At no point has he claimed “inherent” authority that Congress could not affect. He has instead argued that existing law gives him power and dared Congress to rescind it.

If Congress has seemed supine in front of Obama’s claims, the blame should fall squarely on the GOP caucus. Since 2009, Republicans have tried to pretend that the president is, somehow, not really in office, because, well, they shouldn’t ever lose an election. This mummery is not just offensive; it represents unilateral disarmament in the unequal struggle between White House and Capitol Hill. Like most opposition parties, the Republicans don’t have veto-proof majorities. The only way Congress can block a president from taking actions it dislikes is to enact laws—laws and appropriations bills that a president will sign. To do that, the opposition must be willing to sit down and negotiate with the president, giving him part of what he wants in exchange for part of what Congress wants.