Interesting that you put the beginning with Lincoln. While real history will show him to be very much a man of his own culture and time, I always thought he had a healthy respect for the Constitution but was willing to overstep it in the extreme situation of the secession of the southern states. To save the union he considered it prudence to issue the Emancipation Proclamation when his personal platform was to apply gentle pressure and persuasion on the slave owners with compensation for them freeing their slaves voluntarily. Of course that too would have overstepped the limitations incorporated into the Constitution.
One of the best modern histories I have seen written on the Lincoln adminsitration--and yes, I have read it-- is Allen Guelzo's book
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America I agree with the author I pulled the excerpt from. He deserves a Pultizer for History. And his earlier work
Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President is also excellent.
Guelzo argues that history so often leaves out the concept of prudence in the state of affairs:
Excerpt:
. . .Guelzo argues persuasively that Lincoln’s “face was set toward the goal of emancipation from the day he first took the presidential oath.” To achieve this goal, he planned to pursue a policy of legislated, gradual, compensated emancipation from the very outset of his presidency. He believed he could convince Congress to appropriate funds for compensating slave owners to gradually free their slaves. His plan was to begin where slavery was weakest: in the northern most slave states, especially Delaware. . . .
But the enigma was that Lincoln also wrote to Horace Greeley:
[. . . “my paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery, If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”[/indent]
Source:
Abraham Lincoln Saved the Union, But Did He Really Free the Slaves? | Ashbrook
So we have the paradox of a man who was essentially as racist as many in his day torn between doing what was prudent, what was right, what was possible. But overriding the Constituion and the Law I don't see as being on his bucket list of things to accomplish.
That, I think began with the Teddy Roosevelt administration. Strict constitutionalists see the government restricted to what it is authorized to do via the Constitution. Roosevelt demanded that government be allowed to do anything that Constitution did not expressly forbid.
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