The New York Times‘s Charlie Savage relates the history of the imperial presidency:

Presidential power historically goes through ebbs and flows, with fundamental implications for the functioning of the system of checks and balances that defines American-style democracy.

But it has generally been on an upward path since the middle of the 20th century. The growth of the administrative state inside the executive branch, and the large standing armies left in place as World War II segued into the Cold War, inaugurated what the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. coined the “imperial presidency.”

Presidential power waned in the 1970s, in the period encompassing the Watergate scandal and the end of the Vietnam War. Courts proved willing to rule against the presidency, as when the Supreme Court forced President Richard M. Nixon to turn over his Oval Office tapes. Members of both parties worked together to enact laws imposing new or restored limits on the exercise of executive power.

But the present era is very different. Presidential power began to grow again in the Reagan era and after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. And now Mr. Trump, rejecting norms of self-restraint, has pushed to eliminate checks on his authority and stamp out pockets of independence within the government while only rarely encountering resistance from a Supreme Court he reshaped and a Congress controlled by a party in his thrall.

Got that? After a nameless and faceless phenomenon led mysteriously to “the growth of the administrative state inside the executive branch,” the presidency grew imperial only at the hands of Republicans. This imperialism began on its “upward path” under Eisenhower, it became so bad under Nixon that the other branches felt moved to do something about, it increased in severity under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and it’s now being made worse still by Donald Trump.

As for the supine nature of Congress? That’s Republicans’ fault, too:

And Congress, under the control of Mr. Trump’s fellow Republicans, has done little to defend its constitutional role against his encroachments. This includes unilaterally dismantling agencies Congress had said shall exist as a matter of law, firing civil servants in defiance of statutory limits and refusing to spend funds that lawmakers had authorized and appropriated.

This, naturally is great news for the Times‘s readers — who will now have confirmation of what they had suspected all along: That when Democratic presidents try to spend half a trillion dollars without legislative approval, or decree changes to immigration law that they had previously insisted that they were unable to make, or illegally order vaccine mandates and eviction moratoria in defiance of statute, or use the EPA to achieve aims that they could not get through Congress, or go into Libya without permission, that’s different, and it should under no circumstances be considered as part of a problematic structural change that was created by both parties, in pursuit of all manner of ideological aims, and that has been cheered on by legislators whose politics span the political spectrum.