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The reason we don't do these absurd things, of course, is that we see a line between the acceptable and the unacceptable. That bright line is the law, drawn by Congress and regularly surveyed by the judiciary. It can be shifted, but the president has no right to shift it on his own authority. His constitutional war powers give him wide latitude, but those powers are not unlimited.

If you go along with my experiment and assume that the president has the best of motives, then the problem is that he wants to protect the American people but doesn't trust us.

There can be no freedom without some measure of risk. We guarantee freedom of the press, which means that newspapers sometimes print things the government doesn't want printed. We guarantee that defendants cannot be forced to incriminate themselves, which means that sometimes bad guys go free. We accept these risks as the price of liberty.

The president would probably respond that in an era of loose-knit terrorist groups and suitcase nukes, the risks are exponentially greater than those his predecessors faced. Even if you agree, the answer is not to act unilaterally but to go to Congress and the courts and ask them to redraw that line between state power and individual freedom.

These are not tactical decisions about where a tank division should cross the Rhone. They are fundamental questions that go to the nature of this union, and the president is required to trust the American people to decide them.