Washington used to get a good chuckle from a gag about life in the White House with Dick and Pat Nixon. On a typical evening in the mansion, the phone rings and the caller asks the President what he is doing. Answers Nixon: "I'm just sitting here reading the Constitution, and Pat is knitting an American flag."
It is doubtful that Pat Nixon ever knit the flag, but the pervasive involvement of every modern President in interpreting the powers granted by the U.S. Constitution is now a hard and often bruising fact of life. If a President does not actually curl...
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