The editors of the New York Times write that “the rage of the Republican establishment toward [Obama] is growing louder, angrier and more destructive.” And “it is impossible to dismiss the notion that race plays a role in it.” I’m sure they tried really hard.

They cite two alleged manifestations of this rage. The first is the Tom Cotton-organized letter about the Iranian nuclear deal. The Times editorializes:

Try to imagine the outrage from Republicans if a similar group of Democrats had written to the Kremlin in 1986 telling Mikhail Gorbachev that President Ronald Reagan did not have the authority to negotiate a nuclear arms deal at the Reykjavik summit meeting that winter.
There is no functional difference between that example and the Iran talks, except that the congressional Republican caucus does not like Mr. Obama and wants to deny him any policy victory.

Well, here’s one functional difference: The Senate voted to ratify the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty the year after the summit. If Reagan had said that he was going to dispense with any congressional vote, and Democrats had made a public statement saying that any agreement he made on his own would bind neither them nor his successor, their conduct would have been . . . completely appropriate. And probably wouldn’t have had anything to do with race.

The Times then moves on to its second example:

On April 3, Colbert King, a Washington Post columnist[,] summarized a series of actions by Republicans attacking the president’s authority in areas that most Americans thought had been settled by the Civil War. Arizona legislators, for example, have been working on a bill that “prohibits this state or any of its political subdivisions from using any personnel or financial resources to enforce, administer or cooperate with an executive order issued by the president of the United States that has not been affirmed by a vote of Congress and signed into law as prescribed by the United States Constitution.”
The bill sounds an awful lot like John C. Calhoun’s secessionist screed of 1828. . .

I would not describe the extent of the president’s authority over state governments as an entirely settled issue. To the extent that it is settled, though, it has been settled in a way that cuts against the Times’s argument. The Supreme Court has ruled that the federal government generally cannot commandeer state officials. (That limit on federal power is one reason much of the welfare state involves federal inducements to states to act in certain ways.) In many cases, the states incontestably have the authority to refuse to cooperate with federal statutes, let alone with executive orders, and in these cases the Arizona bill can be understood to declare that the state’s policy is not to cooperate.

If the Arizona law ever were to conflict with an executive order, the federal courts would presumably rule either that the president didn’t have the legal authority to issue the disputed part of the order, or that the order trumps the Arizona law.

I’m not sure, then, that this bill does enough to be worth enacting. As insurrections go, it’s not very impressive. But I guess it doesn’t take much to get the Times’s rage against Republicans to grow louder and angrier.