FIRST, THE RENT-SEEKERS GET TO WET THEIR BEAKS.

Our Political Masters have been sounding off recently about the allocations of printed money to study the expansion of Amtrak's national network.  We'll focus first on Wisconsin.  In Illinois, there might be an extension of train service to Rockford, but those trains will be operated by Chicago's Metra, the tax-funded Regional Rail operator.  At the moment, it's all wishful thinking.  "The routes the study secured new grants for were identified by Amtrak as part of a visioning process for what future service could look like."  Government, always good for visioning processes.

MERCHANT, BASKETBALL MAGNATE, SENATOR.

Twitchy contributor Ranty Amy Curtis, a Wisconsin resident, remembers her former senator Herb Kohl.  "He was born in Milwaukee in 1935, the son of Jewish immigrants. He got involved in real estate and business, spawning Kohl's grocery and retail store, which made the Kohl one of the richest U.S. senators in history."  Since then, creative destruction has come for retail, with former Kohl's grocery stores with their distinctive arch roof becoming beer depots or Sentry food stores, and the department store side becoming Amazon parcels terminals, that is, when they're not repurposing Boston Stores.

None of which might be as important as her recollection.  "Back in 2007, this writer and her infant son ran into Kohl at Ma Fischer's -- a local diner Kohl frequented. He was tremendously kind, humble, down-to-earth, and very doting to a random baby in his favorite diner."

I continue to have doubts about his tenure as Bucks owner, mostly thanks to Don Nelson being run off as coach.  Fans are right, though, that his money, and his quest for new owners who wouldn't move the franchise to San Diego Los Angeles Sacramento Las Vegas Alturas (odd how some of those Californian relocations have worked out, isn't it?) did keep professional basketball in Milwaukee for another, long delayed, championship.  (That first one arrived as the last Green Bay trains tied up.)

Kohl money also made possible a bigger arena for Wisconsin basketball, still looking for the first national title in over eighty years, and hockey, continuing to stack titles, particularly by the young ladies.

It's because of Herb Kohl that the University of Wisconsin Men's Hockey Team can play at Fiserv Forum for the annual Kwik Trip Holiday Face-Off.

They also call the Kohl Center home ice because of his generous contribution back in the 90's.

"A man who kept the Milwaukee Bucks here and also built the Kohl Center. I mean just a wonderful person” Jim Becker a Wisconsin Hockey fan explained.

Becker and his buddy Bill Flood are longtime Badger sports fans. They went to school at Wisconsin too.

"Putting the Kohl Center up there just became kinda a little monument out there, a great court, a great atmosphere, the ticket sales went up, the alumni ot engaged." Flood, a proud alumni and fan explained.

UW Athletics said in a statement that the department is "forever in his debt for the arena on campus that bears his name…”

No Bucks, no Fiserv Forum.  The men posted two shutout wins in that holiday tournament.  Will they follow up with a national title for Wisconsin's Herb?  R.I.P.

MARKING OFF.

It has long been my custom to post a Festive Season video, featuring vintage, or sometimes modern-retro, tinplate trains under the tree and a look at progress on the model railroad.  I'm in a somber mood this Festive Season, and this year's video is in that vein.

I'm taking time away from posting for that proverbial long winter's nap, and to work on the railroad.

Thank you for looking in.  Posting will resume, if all goes well, after the maids come a-milking, with the next Friday short takes around Three Kings.  There will be no drummers drumming or pipers piping to herald that resumption.

PILING DEFERENTS UPON EPICYCLES UPON SAECULA.

We'll close this year of reading with Neil Howe's The Fourth Turning is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End.  We're all the way to Book Review N^o. 16 and I really should rethink how much energy to devote to what areas of venting and ranting I engage in in 2024.

If popular books were presented and sold like college textbooks, The Fourth Turning is Here would more likely be presented as Generations 3^e, with some acknowledgement of the passing of coauthor William Strauss since the publication of Generations 2^e, er, The Fourth Turning.

LET THERE BE A RECKONING.

Inside Higher Ed's Steven Mintz has been on a roll of late, acknowledging the malpractice of the English departments, suggesting the propensity of sociology and anthropology to defend their tight priors isn't advisable, and suggesting that activism isn't necessarily the best extension of one's scholarship.

III. ADVENT.

There's almost no chance of a white Christmas at Cold Spring Shops headquarters.  The street is pretty well decorated all the same.

Despite the ongoing war with Ukraine, there are Polar Express-type operations on Russian metals.  Better not be on the naughty list, you might be counting trees in Siberia for a quarter century!

This time of year, though, it might be wise to have the Saint come rolling in.

Frank Dumbleton photograph retrieved from Rail Advent.

That's a retro-kitbashed Saint.  If you could start with the Saint diagram and engineer the Halls, why not start with a Hall and reverse-engineer a Saint?

Remember to keep playing nice after next week.

THE CORRELATION OF FORCES IS CHANGING.

Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan links to "Academic freedom is the loser when big donors hound US university presidents" by Robert B. (Often wrong, never in doubt) Reich.  She highlights his concluding passage,  "As a Jew, I cannot help but worry, too, that the actions of these donors will fuel the very antisemitism they claim to oppose – based on the perilous stereotype of wealthy Jewish bankers controlling the world."  It's not as though an intramural fight within the coastal establishment between university donors, some of whom are Jewish, and university trustees and administrators, some of whom are Jewish, is going to lead to any revision of priors among the tiki-torch-Charlottesville protest types.

HOME COURT ADVANTAGE?

Last night, Indiana Pacers guard Oscar Tshiebwa scored his first points as a Pacer.  Milwaukee Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo scored a personal and team best 64 points in a Bucks win.  The game took place in Milwaukee.

I can think of two simple rules for ownership of the game ball, it belongs to the home team, which would vest property rights in the Bucks, or it belongs to the winning team, which would vest property rights in the Bucks.  And yet somebody on the Pacers' bench had the presence of mind to hang onto it for Mr Tshiebwa.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

The limitations that trammel inquiry are within the universities.  "Universities claim to support free speech and academic freedom only when those are used to advance a given narrative. When someone uses them to attack the narrative, they get hammered."  Expedience is their most important product.  "College administrators have been weaponizing the First Amendment when it suits them, and blatantly disregarding it when it doesn’t."  And the worst get on top, starting at Harvard.  "Claudine Gay was chosen for a different set of credentials—her race, gender, political views, and religious devotion to DEI—and she is delivering on her promise to rededicate the university to identity politics."  In an academy full of careerist cowards, truth is the first casualty.  "We must also convince scientists to use those freedoms to follow the truth wherever it leads and to tell the truth even when doing so seems to conflict with other priorities." That article also includes an instructive note. "Work ignored upon publication has not been censored."

Hanukkah has ended, with a modern meditation. "Back then, the Jews of Judea were ruled by the Hellenist King, Antiochus IV. He declared Jews could no longer practice their religion -- on pain of death. Today, a new group of people, known as Hamas, have declared the same. Our Jewish forefathers in Judea had an answer for Antiochus. Today our brothers and sisters in Israel have the same answer for Hamas."

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

TRAMMELLING INQUIRY IS THE PRIME DIRECTIVE.

When Harvard president Claudine Gay said something about "her truth," she meant it.  As dean of Arts and Sciences, she presented a plan worthy of Procrustes.

She provided a remarkable summary of her views in her memorandum on August 20, 2020, to the Faculty of Arts & Sciences when she was serving as Dean. In that memo she set out her radical vision of the “transformational project” she had in mind for Harvard—a project that would redefine every aspect of the university in an effort to advance what she called “racial justice.” This meant prioritizing race in faculty appointments; pursuing “inclusive excellence” (a euphemism for lowering academic standards); expanding the diversity bureaucracy—aka expanding “leadership opportunities for staff of color;” and selectively favoring minority candidates for promotion of staff in managerial and executive roles.

None of this was hidden, though the general public appears to have little understanding as to what it meant and how forcefully President Gay would implement it.

There's more in the memo, none of it good.

The project of building a truly inclusive scholarly community begins with what we consider worthy of research and teaching. A full account of contemporary American society demands scholarship that affirms the relevance, significance, and worth of diverse cultural backgrounds and histories. Moreover, preparing our students for leadership in today’s globalized yet profoundly unequal society, requires an education that includes the voices, stories, and lived experiences of those too long pushed to the margins. With these goals in mind, I plan a series of investments across our academic enterprise.

This fall, we will reactivate the cluster hire in ethnicity, indigeneity, and migration, with the goal of making four new faculty appointments. These appointments are critical to our long-term efforts to strengthen our research and teaching capacity, and ensure that our students have access to this vital body of knowledge. In order to accelerate our progress, however, I am also establishing the Harvard College Visiting Professorship in Ethnicity, Indigeneity, and Migration to recruit leading scholars of race and ethnicity to spend a year at Harvard College actively engaged in teaching our undergraduates. Beginning in 2021-2022, the FAS will appoint up to two new visiting scholars each year, based on recommendations from academic departments. Finally, to seed new research directions and develop the next generation of scholars, we will also invest in the academic pipeline. The Inequality in America postdoctoral fellowship program, which currently recruits two new fellows each year, will be expanded in the coming year to recruit two additional early career scholars whose work focuses specifically on issues of racial and ethnic inequality.

I wonder how tight the priors are of the candidates who screen for the jobs, and of the faculty committees who make the call (nobody is offered a job at Harvard, you see.)  Actually, I don't.  "Relevance, significance, and worth" are criteria that can include irrelevance, insignificance, and worthlessness, but good luck finding any research dead ends along the lines of "nothing happened," let alone of students offered the opportunity to consider the criteria by which these scholars deem outcomes to be relevant, significant, and worthy.

LOSING THE GOOD OF THE INTELLECT.

Tussles between state legislators and the regents of their state universities are nothing new.  Years ago, the Regents of the University of Wisconsin adopted a resolution in response to legislative interference.

WHATEVER MAY BE THE LIMITATIONS WHICH TRAMMEL INQUIRY ELSEWHERE, WE BELIEVE THAT THE GREAT STATE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN SHOULD EVER ENCOURAGE THAT CONTINUAL AND FEARLESS SIFTING AND WINNOWING BY WHICH ALONE THE TRUTH CAN BE FOUND.

At the time, the legislators wanted the University to fire economist Richard T. Ely, who had some favorable things to say about socialism.  That Ely, and his colleague John R. Commons, both wrote things that don't measure up to contemporary standards is at once irrelevant, because it was the past, and central, because it's the implementation of those contemporary standards, to the current tussle between legislature and the regents of the Wisconsin system.

A nearly six-month standoff between the Universities of Wisconsin and the Republican-led state Legislature over diversity, equity and inclusion spending seemed poised to end Saturday morning. The Board of Regents had agreed to vote on a deal between system leaders and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos that would freeze and cap DEI hiring in exchange for funding held up by the Legislature.

But in a shocking turn of events, the board rejected the proposal 9 to 8 , leaving over $800 million on the table and the future of the system’s DEI offices in limbo. The board also voted not to table the vote for further discussion, effectively killing the deal.

On Friday, UW system president Jay Rothman and UW Madison chancellor Jennifer Mnookin announced they’d reached a deal with Vos after weeks of secret negotiations. The system would make significant concessions on DEI initiatives and staffing in exchange for a release on much-needed funding for pay raises, utilities and construction projects—including a new engineering building at UW Madison—which the Legislature rejected last month.

The situation seems tailor-made for the regents to invoke the sifting and winnowing clause, rather than engage in such unedifying horse-trading of some diversity deanlets for a new engineering building and a few other things, including an endowed chair in conservative studies.  Wisconsin governor Tony "Pencil Neck" Evers (D - Public Instruction) sounds amenable to such an invocation.

The Board of Regents should be able to make decisions about what’s best for our students, faculty, staff, and, ultimately, what’s best for the University of Wisconsin System without fear of threats and political pressure or retribution.

It appears, though, that the regents are not going to invoke the "sifting and winnowing" proposition, nor are the legislators going to buy it.

A NINETEENTH CENTURY SOAP OPERA.

I was not happy with Ridley Scott's recent Napoleon.

Yes, and it is in the blood of contemporary writers and directors to turn every story into Dynasty, or perhaps Keeping Up with the Kardashians with hand-sewn costumes.  It's. A. Contemporary. Movie.  If it leaves people with the impression that Josephine's menopause was the proximate cause of a decade of misery east of the Rhine, so be it.  Anything can happen in a cartoon, or a soap opera, even one set up as a blockbuster movie about a Corsican corporal.

That's where The Daily Signal's Tyler O'Neil wound up.

It takes a certain kind of genius to ruin a film about Napoleon Bonaparte.

For crying out loud, this is the Corsican artillery commander who became the de facto emperor of continental Europe, the man who carried the French Revolution into Spain, Italy, Austria, and Germany, sparking the political movements that would culminate in the First World War.

This man doomed the Spanish empire, freeing Latin America from its rule and enabling the U.S. to double in size in the Louisiana Purchase. He did all this and found time to craft a law code on par with the Roman Emperor Justinian.

This man coopted an atheistic revolution, convinced the pope to come to Paris to crown him, and then, in a fit of pique, decided to crown himself instead.

Depending on your perspective, Napoleon smothered Europe with divisive passions or brought enlightenment to a backward continent. He either represents the apotheosis of the French Revolution or its ultimate betrayal.

So many moments in Napoleon’s life would make excellent standout films. The subject is an artist’s dream.

Yet somehow, director Ridley Scott managed to make this quintessentially enigmatic historical figure drop-dead boring.

Look no further than the cover of Beethoven's Eroica to see that tension between apotheosis and betrayal.

TODAY IN FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS.

Sometimes it's living upstairs from the pizzeria, sometimes it's having a barbecue joint as a neighbor.

A local woman is suing Roy’s Meat Service, a local meat market and barbeque restaurant located in East Nashville, claiming that the smell of grilling and smoked meats is a “nuisance.”

According to Newschannel 5, Natalie Castillo moved into the home next to the restaurant two years ago. But apparently she didn’t do her research, because Roy Meat Service has been grilling up meat in the neighborhood for the past 9 years.

I mean, what do you really expect when you move next to a restaurant that serves smoked meats? If you ask me that just adds to the value of the property, getting to smell smoked meats all day.But the neighbor isn’t happy, and filed a lawsuit against the local business, alleging among other things that part of the restaurant encroaches on her property and that the smoke from the constant grilling is a nuisance. Castillo says in the complaint that the constant smoking of ribs, chicken and pork affect her “ability to enjoy her property as well as negatively affects her health.”

For his part, owner Jeff Roy says that the restaurant has tried to address the neighbor’s complaints, but nothing has seemed to satisfy her.

After you've exhausted the opportunities for Coasian bargaining, perhaps your only conclusion must be that some people lead really empty lives.  Nothing new there, either.  "Woke wine women aren't as enthusiastic about diversity when it rolls up to the local park as they might be at work."

THE CASE AGAINST SPEECH CODES.

It's in Rev. G. S. Hagler's "If Everything Is Antisemitic Then Nothing Is."  On one level, we can read the column and play a word-substitution game.  For example, replace "antisemitic" with "racist."  On a logical level, that's straightforward: a description incapable of distinction is useless except as a cheap smear.  As a persuasive tool, it fails.  That's where the reverend's column takes us.  "Unfounded charges of antisemitism have become an instrument to short-circuit debate and discussion, and to bully people into silence where there needs to be discussion, analysis, and dialogue."  I'd prefer he use the term "discourse" rather than "dialogue," but that is an aesthetic objection.

L.A. IS A GREAT BIG FREEWAY.

Not big enough, according to "experts."

So we take part of the expressway out of service to do the construction, which might reduce the vehicle flow whilst temporarily increasing the cramming: then comes the ribbon-cutting, and afterwards, the number of trucks will soar further, and the cramming will return to pre-construction levels.  "The idea of simply paving our way to reduced travel times should thus be a non-starter."

Let's, instead, look at that special pleading in the third paragraph of the report. "[Unspecified] Transportation officials [whose salaries and promotion opportunities depend on building and maintaining their fiefdoms] say the widening is necessary [in the absence of any market tests] because a soaring number of trucks is cramming each day onto an inefficient route [in the absence of any market tests] that needs to be modernized [where 'needs' is in the sense of 'we're sticking someone else with the bill']."

For instance, taxpayers alone presumably will be on the hook for that separate truck lane in the vicinity of the 405 interchange.  I see no reference to a toll lane or to special assessments on the motor carriers.  (Again, as an aside, with a California full of politicians who are implacably hostile to Our President, getting this project into an infrastructure bill might not be easy.)

Five years and a new president later, it's not any better.

Brake lights, honking horns and drivers battling it out to the very end of merge lanes — all familiar scenes for California drivers.

For those who live in the Golden State, gridlock is part of life. This may be why three California freeways are among the “most loathed highways in America,” according to a recent survey.

Vehicle dealer Gunther Volvo Cars Daytona Beach surveyed 3,000 drivers across the U.S. in October 2023, and then ranked the top 100 most loathed roads to drive on based on those results.

As it turns out, the top three detested highways in the country, according to this survey, are in the Golden State.

The top three are the San Diego Freeway, I-405, which “carves its path through the heart of Los Angeles, earning notoriety as a symbol of gridlock nightmare,” Interstate Five, "Some contributing factors to what makes this highway undesirable include endless construction and the dreaded 'rush hour,'" and California 101, particularly in the big cities.  Rounding out the top five are the Pennsylvania Turnpike, particularly near Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, and Interstate 70 from Denver into the ski areas.  Whether an interstate highway should have been run through Glenwood Canyon is for another day.

I'm not sure how this Florida based Volvo dealership obtained participants in the survey.  To my eye, it illustrates the folly of running expressways into big cities, as among the rogue's gallery are the Kennedy-Dan Ryan, Eisenhower, and Stevenson Expressways of Chicago, but nobody saw fit to mention the Borman through northwest Indiana.  The Indianapolis Beltway makes the list.  Has anybody considered closing it for part of Memorial Day and doing twenty laps around it for the Indianapolis 500?  In Milwaukee, the sections of Interstate 94 and 43 that are either undergoing widening or are the subject of local analysis paralysis before any widening takes place.

I suspect, though, that if anybody raises the idea of turning those expressways into tollways (which the Chicago portions singled out are not) or applying congestion pricing in urban areas, the Volvo drivers who participated in the survey would cry like babies whose candy had just been taken.

JUST GET RID OF THE SPEECH CODES.

Two years ago, I had some fun with a proposed code of conduct at the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh.

The morale conditioners at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh decided to take a stand against disrespectful interaction, envisioning "An environment that is free of harassment and free of insulting and demeaning comments and epithets based on race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, age, disability, military status, socioeconomic status, family status or political views; and consistently enforces federal, state and university protections against discriminatory treatment yet is free from any official speech codes."  Anybody catch the internal inconsistency?  "So students have a right to expect an environment free from insulting and demeaning comments and from any official speech codes?"  Good luck with that.

That post anticipated what transpired in that Congressional hearing last week.

I wonder if asserting that a statement is "racist" or any of the other -isms or -phobias is insulting or demeaning on its face. Or if referring to someone as "neanderthal" or "deplorable" or generally engaging in the usual casual common-room smugness is also grounds for a harassment complaint? The policy appears to leave that opportunity available. "Members respect and accommodate the views and needs of others in order to allow the development of individual potential."

Clearly, to those poseurs presiding at Harvard, MIT, and Penn some harassment is more actionable than others.  The asses have been kicked.  The names have been taken.  Now is time to take stock.

REPLAY REVIEW MAKES FOR LESS ACCURATE REFEREEING.

I can say so, for whatever good it does.  "Expect the officials to do their job, and they'll likely do a better job than they do now, when they can make mistakes and have them corrected by Mission Control."

When a sports pundit calls attention, perhaps the league will work the problem.

If officiating wasn’t already on the radar for the NFL’s winter meetings this week, a host of blown calls on Sunday may have driven it into the agenda.

Just one week after an officiating crew drew intense scrutiny for missing multiple egregious pass interference penalties in the matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and Green Bay Packers, multiple games on Sunday had a rash of flags thrown (or not thrown) that left coaches and players lashing out in frustration. In three instances, calls appeared to significantly impact games that will likely have implications on playoff seeding at the end of the season. That reality again raises the specter that the league continues to fail in its quest for consistent officiating — which is even more troubling now that the NFL has embraced gambling as a driver of new revenue streams.

While missed or improper penalties are often the most spotlighted issues each week of the season, the growing concern and frustration of team front offices and coaching staffs is how the league’s crews are varying in the way they call games. The inconsistency between one crew to the next often leaves teams feeling as if they’re facing two jobs each Sunday: figuring out the team on the other sideline, and then figuring out how a crew is calling a game while it’s still unfolding. When the latter effort falters, it can create some explosive moments from teams in the immediate wake of a game.

Not necessarily including the Kansas City Chiefs going to the old hook-and-trailer, only to have one of the receivers line up offside.

I submit, dear reader, that the problem is the technology.

Even in a league where the officiating is regularly under fire, the run of issues over the past two Sundays is significant, particularly when the miscues impact wins and losses for a multitude of teams positioning themselves for playoff seeding. That alone calls into question why the league’s team owners continue to prioritize cost over more aggressive approaches to resolving the problems through the use of technology, full-time officials, or simply taking a tougher approach to crews or individual officials that have a history of blowing calls.

Continue the after-action reviews, but get rid of the challenges and the reviews, particularly those opportunities for the replay office to butt in in the final two minutes.  What incentive, other than pride, does an official have to get a close call right as the half or the game ends, when there's always the eye in the sky to issue the corrections?

THE BULLPUCKEY TRICKLES DOWN FROM THE IVY LEAGUE TO THE MID-MAJORS.

Poor Northern Illinois University has gone from being honored by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, now the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression with a "Speech Code of the Month" recognition to ... not being listed at all in the Foundation's Free Speech Rankings, mostly a rogue's gallery of progressive intolerance practiced each day.  I'm mildly annoyed by that, as it was their awarding a "Red Light" ranking to the university's speech code that inspired me to invent what became the Foundation's "red light warning" Internet gadget.

II. ADVENT.

Mariah Carey's Christmas album brackets her popular hit, "All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth You" as band 2 with "Silent Night" leading and "O Holy Night" following.  Both of those recordings have made their way onto the music channels' Christian channels during the festive season.

"O Holy Night" has musical accompaniment that sounds like it might have been recorded gospel style, and the video confirms it.

The hymn is an Italian composition, and as such more amenable to popular arrangement and orchestration than hymns from more northern climes.

But why, particularly given the setting, did she and the choir director cut the stanza that includes "Chains shall He break, as the slave is our brother, and in His name all oppression shall cease?"

Or perhaps I should not carp.  Enjoy.  And if there is no Festive Season train coming your way, see fit to send in-kind or cash assistance to your local food pantry.

MAYBE THE PRESIDENT SHOULDN'T BEHAVE LIKE AN ELECTED DICTATOR.

I've been consistent on that score.  "[I]f you don't like the idea of a president acting like an elected despot, vest fewer powers in the presidency."

If you're writing for Common Dreams, like Will Bunch does, and the potential president is Donald Trump, you might agree.  "We Know That Wannabe Dictator Trump Can Win in 2024—So What Is to Be Done?"

But if the president in question is Joe Biden, and you're fangirling for Sandy Cortez, like predictable useful idiot Julia Conley is, acting like a dictator is just fine.  "'He Needs to Step Up': Ocasio-Cortez Urges New Student Debt Relief From Biden."  And Dementia Joe, despite being thwarted in several manifestations of that dictatorial urge, is still at it.  "I won’t back down from using every tool at our disposal to get student loan borrowers the relief they need."

And if it's depriving Normals of their ability to cook their food, heat their homes, or get around, Common Dreams types still don't mind Dementia Joe behaving like a dictator.  "More than 360 climate and rights groups filed a legal petition [in January 2022] that calls on the Biden administration to utilize its executive authority to phase out federal oil and gas production on public lands and oceans."  And if the dictator collaborates with the executive committee of the ruling class, that's also fine.  "Progressive members of Congress, including Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, urged the president to support a complete phaseout of fossil fuels."

There are limits, though, as useful idiot Julia Conley just discovered.  "Rushing deadly weapons to the far-right and openly genocidal Israeli government without congressional review robs American voters of their voice in Congress."

There's a reason the Federal Constitution establishes Congressional powers in Article I and specifies presidential powers in Article II.  It might do the self-styled progressives, whenever they look to the presidency as the way to get what they want, to contemplate the presidency held by somebody who doesn't agree with them.