RUTHFULLY YOURS

History will ill-serve Eric Holder if it does no more than echo the view common in the wake of his resignation that his tenure as Attorney General was “controversial.” Mr. Holder’s more than five years as the nation’s chief legal officer were consequential.

In tandem with Barack Obama ‘s White House, Mr. Holder pushed the authority of the federal government and its administrative agencies beyond the edge of the Constitution and law. They did so not in one or several controversial instances, as with past presidencies, but repeatedly and across the breadth of the federal government.

Universities, public schools, fire and police departments, the financial industry, utilities, state legislatures, orders of nuns, black parents, small-business owners, the electrons inside the Internet, random sections of the U.S. Constitution—all have learned that what they took to be the clear meaning of existing law was wrong.

Messrs. Obama and Holder have attempted to make federal legal authority limitless. The Obama-Holder theory of law—that the needs of justice, as they define it, supersede the law’s boundaries—deserves to be repudiated. It has no precedent outside progressive law journals or various periods in South American history.

Mr. Obama made his intentions clear. In July 2011, the president said in public he’d like to “bypass Congress and change the laws on my own.” The phrase, “change the laws on his own,” is not in the U.S. Constitution. The next year, Mr. Obama made his now-famous and unconstitutional recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. The recess appointments were the tip of the iceberg.

For the firm of Obama & Holder, shocking the conscience of sitting federal judges with legal overstepping is just another day in court. The Obama lawyers’ legal justification for their actions has often been, in effect, what difference does it make? That isn’t a legal argument. Yet.

ObamaCare’s serial revisions of law we know about. As important are the less illuminated leaps. After the Obama administration tried to overrun a federal judge’s ruling in 2011 that its initial ban on off-shore oil drilling was overly broad, U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman found the government in contempt: “Each step the government took following the court’s imposition of a preliminary injunction showcases its defiance.”

Even in the outback of a 2013 nuclear-waste case we find D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Brett Kavanaugh writing that the administration’s legal claims raised “significant questions about the scope of the Executive’s authority to disregard federal statutes.”

Harry Reid ‘s nuclear option turned advice and consent into rubble, so it’s possible that with 51 votes in the lame-duck Senate, Mr. Obama could place Holder-II in the Justice Department. (My guess for the Obama nuclear-optioned nominee is former White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler ; no one else will as reliably extend the franchise.)

It won’t be possible at those confirmation hearings to suppress Republican compulsions to rage over their greatest hits, such as Fast and Furious. But a smart GOP would use this confirmation to offer the American people a much-needed tutorial on the rule of law and why it matters—for everyone.

Such as the black parents of children in demonstrably failed public schools. Will Mr. Holder’s successor explain, in words any parent can understand, the actions Justice took against Louisiana’s school-voucher program? Justice’s lawyers argued that because too many minority parents were using vouchers to move their children out of public schools, it upset the schools’ racial identity and “impeded the desegregation process” dating back 40 years.

As with Mr. Holder’s separate “disparate-impact” cases, which replaced findings of de facto discrimination with statistical associations, the federal reach becomes limitless.

Also needing elaboration from the next Holder is whether parents sending their kids to college in America today need to retain a lawyer as the cost of surviving four years of school.

The Holder Justice Department, aligned with the Education Department, is forcing all U.S. universities to adopt Title IX sexual-abuse procedures which, whatever their intention, obliterate due process rights for students enrolled in these institutions. The federal government is creating a parallel, or perhaps new, legal system. The Queen of Hearts’ theory of the law—”Sentence first; verdict afterwards”—was a cartoon. This is real.

If Republicans don’t make a public issue now of the dangers these policies carry for American governance, then Messrs. Obama and Holder win. Future federal lawyers, of any party, will pocket the advantage and use it.

Hillary Clinton may be “better” than her old boss, but her legal teams will be recruited from the same progressive legal benches that rationalized these unprecedented enforcements.

To extend the partisan thought: The Holder transition is an opportunity for Republicans with ambition to sharpen their views on the perils of the limitless administrative state. This is the beating heart of anxious conservatives’ complaint with Washington. It’s why the left mocks them and audits them. It’s why when Rand Paul or Ted Cruz talk about federal authority, people listen.

Good subject. Thanks, of a sort, to Eric Holder for raising it.

Write to henninger@wsj.com