Abstract
In many respects the Barack Obama presidency has become a unifying force for both conservatives and liberals. Conservatives seem united in looking aghast at what they consider to be the radical and comprehensive remaking of American national government—a remaking that seems to reject not only the American constitutional order, but to exceed even the ambitions of the New Deal and Great Society in its extension of governmental authority into the private sphere. Yet the developments since 2009 have been in the making for the better part of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries, as the Constitution appears to have