It is stunning what a president can achieve if he has little respect for constitutional governance and a good feel as how to pull the levers of raw power.

This I think is the real meaning of the Iran deal (although the potential national security issues are just as important).

Max Boot refers today to the Iranian nuclear deal as being "passed"–his quotation marks. It hasn't really been passed, and certainly not in the way the Constitution set up for passage of a treaty, which is what this deal is. President Obama knew he'd never get the votes for a treaty–so, hey, it's not a treaty.

When it became clear that President Obama didn't intend to treat his treaty with Iran like a treaty, the Corker-Cardin legislation made a feint at giving Congress some oversight. It set up a process by which the president could "win" with a minority of the Senate supporting the deal.

With forty-two Democrats lined up behind the Iran nuclear deal, the Democrats are cutting off debate, even though the deal is unpopular in the country, if polls are to be believed, and has a strong majority against it in the Senate.

On the ruthlessness with which the president uses the levers of power, Boot comments:

Using all of the political muscle at their disposal, Obama and Harry Reid managed to corral 42 votes to cut off debate on the Iran deal. Fifty-eight senators, including four Democrats, voted against the deal; 42 senators, all Democrats, supported it. Never mind that this is a violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the Corker-Cardin legislation, passed nearly unanimously by both houses, which was designed to allow a congressional vote on the deal. (Not that Corker-Cardin is to blame: Obama would have done the same thing, without or without that bill.)

You have to give Obama credit at some level: Like LBJ, he has shown himself to be a shrewd and ruthless vote-counter, who can produce just enough votes to sustain his policies, no matter what it takes. In Obama’s case, what that took was vituperative rhetoric suggesting that opponents of the deal were war-mongers and Zionist dupes.

Bill Kristol has a good piece on "The Supporting Actors," who voted for the deal, even after making devastating comments about it. Kristol quotes from these comments and it is clear that these Democrats know full well that this is an extremely dangerous deal for the U.S. and the Middle East. And yet they voted for it. Why?

It’s pretty clear why they now support the deal. They’re scared of the consequences within the Democratic party of opposing Obama, of crossing the left, of standing against “peace.” And they think they can get the best of both worlds: They can unenthusiastically support the deal while expressing ineffectual and not-to-be-acted-on doubts, covering their bets, and then quickly moving on.

After all, they can reason, President Obama is the one who will be blamed if things go wrong. It’s his deal. We said we would have negotiated a better one. And anyway, who today blames the 390 members of Parliament who supported Neville Chamberlain’s government after Munich? Many of those supporting actors went on to successful political careers.

But we do not have a parliamentary system here. Here we hold individual senators and representatives accountable. And no dissenting member of the Democratic party is about to assume power, reverse course, and rescue the party’s name from infamy, as Churchill did in Britain.

No. The Democrats have become the party of the Iran deal. They are the party that has embraced a deal that reeks of dishonor, strengthens our enemies, and increases the chances of war. Their statements demonstrate that they knew better. They were just afraid to do the right thing.

Well, let us hope that, if the deal is as bad as we think, there will be a stinging rebuke to those who supported it while knowing better.

Meanwhile, I'd like to hear the GOP candidates address the question of whether there is a remedy when a president is willing to get whatever he wants by acting outside the Constitution and usurping the authority of Congress. 

Or have we recently learned something that can never be unlearned: that a president can be a monarch if he (or she) is sufficiently daring. (It also takes a certain insouciance about our founding documents and legal system.)

Has our system been changed beyond repair or can we do something to ensure that presidents don't act like imperators?

I'd almost rather hear the candidates on this than specific issues. It would reveal the depth, or lack thereof, of each candidate's knowledge of our history and system of government and whether the republic remains a republic.