I really appreciated this conversation with @seanilling who was unfailingly fair-minded and civil 1/ https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/1197946536878956544

The long conversation was, with fair warning, edited down, and not maliciously or unfairly. But inevitably some points are lost 2/

Folks on Twitter have focused on what I say about Trump and Democrats, but this line in that passage was left on the cutting room floor: “Who's going to do more long-term harm and harm to the institutions of the country?”

Sean was kind enough to provide the text of the unedited answer and here it is 4/

It’s not as though the Left has been scared straight in the Trump era into a rigorous constitutionalism, or Elizabeth Warren wouldn’t have gotten so much traction or sympathetic press coverage prior to her Medicare for All debacle 5/

I expand on this point in a recent column 6/ https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/elizabeth-warren-shows-contempt-for-legal-constitutional-boundaries/

And it’s relevant here that almost no one on the center-left objected to Obama’s “pen and phone” governance, or his unilateral re-writing of immigration law 7/

The Left still believes in a “living Constitution” that is an infinitely malleable means of law-making from the judiciary and an administrative state unmoored from traditional constitutional constraints 8/

Would it really be so hard for progressives to say of Obama’s unilateral immig law, “I support the goal, but he doesn’t have the authority,” or to say of much of what Trump has done or said, “He has the legal or constitutional authority, but he shouldn’t have done it”? 9/

But the Left, as a general matter, doesn’t think this way. Again, if it did, it would be appalled that Elizabeth Warren is running on a program dismissive of constitutional and legal constraints. It’s not 10/

Finally, judges aren’t everything and they don’t erase Trump’s flaws but because he is allied with the conservative legal movement, he is nominating judges who will apply an originalist understanding of the Constitution for a generation and when he’s long gone END/