Daily Inspiration Quote by Francis Biddle

A wartime president, Biddle implies, doesn’t so much consult the Constitution as step over it. The line lands with a dry lawyer’s bite: not “ignored,” not “violated,” but “not greatly bothered.” That phrasing is the trick. It turns constitutional limits into an inconvenience, like paperwork, and in doing so indicts the way emergency power sells itself as practicality.

Biddle knew the machinery from the inside. As FDR’s Attorney General and later the chief U.S. judge at Nuremberg, he watched liberal democracy stretch under the pressure of World War II: internment, censorship, loyalty investigations, the broad deference courts and Congress often grant the executive when the stakes are framed as national survival. His intent isn’t to score a cheap shot at presidents; it’s to puncture the comforting civics-myth that our system “holds” automatically when fear enters the room. In practice, war reorganizes the separation of powers around speed, secrecy, and command.

The subtext is darker: the Constitution is only as strong as the political culture willing to be bothered by it. Wartime doesn’t merely tempt presidents to overreach; it invites everyone else to look away. Biddle’s sentence also carries a quiet warning about hindsight. Once the emergency ends, the precedents and habits remain, ready for the next crisis. It’s a minimalist line with maximal consequence: the test of constitutional government is not eloquent parchment, but whether constraints still feel mandatory when they are most inconvenient.