President Obama might have been economical with the truth when he promised Americans they could keep their doctors when Obamacare takes effect, but he is proving a man of his word when it comes to the exercise of presidential power as he defines it. “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone,” he told his cabinet, developing a theme of his State of the Union message. “We’re not just going to be waiting for legislation, or plans, or any logical idea of what will result in order to make sure we’re providing Americans the kind of help I’ve decided they need.” Liberals, or progressives as they now prefer to be called, found this activism cheering; conservatives and constitutionalists found it a chilling echo of some Latin American caudillo.

The presidential telephone so far has been deployed primarily in an effort to persuade Vladimir Putin to leave the Crimea, but a 90-minute call seems to have had little impact on an adversary who responds more to a display of power than of rhetoric. The pen, however, is proving mightier than the telephone: the president is using it to make changes in the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) without bothering to obtain congressional approval, to tighten the regulatory noose around the neck of the coal industry, to prevent his Justice Department from enforcing a law that makes use of marijuana illegal, and now to drive wages up and profits down. For all his jacket-less, tie-less informality, Obama’s presidency is as close to an imperial one as we have had in modern memory.