The scope of what you can get away with has exceeded the scope of what you are allowed more or less throughout American history; but keep in mind one crucial difference:
In a (perverse, and not wholly useful) sense, the criminal disobeys the law; but he gives the law its due in the course of setting himself at a state of war with it, and dealing with the mixture of force and concealment that that state requires.
Far more corrosive than the man who breaks the law is the man who puts himself above it, or has his crack team of legalists (lookin’ at Yoo, Yoo…) chop logic and precedent into a meaningless slurry where the word of the law is sacred and ossified and its spirit wholly violated.
