The New York Times has its Trumpiest headline ever.

Here's the article: "Trump Asserts a Muscular Vision of Presidential Power on First Day Back/In a flurry of unilateral executive actions, Mr. Trump revived disputed claims of broad presidential authority from his first term — and made some new ones. Court battles seem likely."

That's by Charlie Savage. Excerpt:

[National Emergencies Act of 1976] does not tightly define the circumstances under which presidents may determine that an emergency exists, leaving them with essentially unfettered discretion to unlock exigent powers for themselves. But previous presidents adhered to norms of self-restraint....

In the wake of Mr. Trump’s first term, House Democrats in 2021 passed a bill that would have tightened limits on presidential use of emergency powers, part of a package of reforms they called the “Protecting Our Democracy Act.” But Republicans opposed the measure as a partisan attack on a president who was no longer in office anyway, rendering it dead on arrival in the Senate....

The nation’s energy situation hardly seems like an emergency.... But the order said Mr. Trump had determined that Biden administration policies had “driven our nation into a national emergency, where a precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply, and an increasingly unreliable grid, require swift and decisive action.” He also cited a growing need for electricity to run computer servers for artificial intelligence projects....

ADDED: I feel motivated to reprint a blog post of mine from the Obama Era:

February 13, 2014

"When President Obama told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in March 2012 that 'after my election I have more flexibility'..."

"...most assumed he was referring to foreign policy. It turns out Mr. Obama's ambitions weren't so limited."

IN THE COMMENTS: retail lawyer writes:

Question for Ann: How are law schools explaining this new flexibility, promulgation, the Take Care clause, etc.? How do you think they'll be teaching it in the future? Sometimes I wish I still were in law school.

And I said:

I'd quote Justice Jackson in the Steel Seizure Case: 

I cannot be brought to believe that this country will suffer if the Court refuses further to aggrandize the presidential office, already so potent and so relatively immune from judicial review, at the expense of Congress.

But I have no illusion that any decision by this Court can keep power in the hands of Congress if it is not wise and timely in meeting its problems. A crisis that challenges the President equally, or perhaps primarily, challenges Congress. If not good law, there was worldly wisdom in the maxim attributed to Napoleon that "The tools belong to the man who can use them." We may say that power to legislate for emergencies belongs in the hands of Congress, but only Congress itself can prevent power from slipping through its fingers.

"The tools belong to the man who can use them."

It's a great line. 

But sometimes you've just got tools lying around, and no one can use them too well, and some men and women try to use them to halfway build something and then they leave it leaking and creaking for some other man to whip into shape with those tools, which he's not too good at using, but he keeps tinkering away, ineptly, and everyone watches and bitches about it, and you've just got some huge hulking crappy thing that's never going to work right, but so much damned effort was put into building the thing that we just go ahead and use it anyway.