The column that’s rattling around our editorial sanctum as we begin the new year is about the “pesky Constitution.” That’s the phrase of Frank Miele, a columnist for RealClearPolitics and publisher of Heartland Diary USA and former managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake at Kalispell, Montana. He really nails what was so outrageous about the way Secretary of Defense Mattis turned on President Trump.

“It turns out,” Mr. Miele writes, “that the president of the United States — the constitutionally authorized commander-in-chief — is beholden to his generals and secretary of defense. At least, that’s what we are led to believe by the smug letter of resignation tendered by General Jim Mattis and the reaction to it among fawning Democrats and ‘Never Trump’ Republicans.”

All of them, he adds, “seemed ready to go to war for Secretary of Defense Mattis — as long as it was a war against Trump. Somehow, the advice of generals has now become mandatory rather than suggestive. If Mattis says we should keep troops in Syria, then that settles it! Thank God no one told President Lincoln he was required to do whatever his idiot generals told him to do.”

What we like about Mr. Miele’s column is his partiality to the prism of the Constitution. The parchment gives Congress the power to declare war and the President to command the armed forces. “It grants,” Mr. Miele marks, “no power of any kind to the secretary of defense, whether he is a decorated general like Mattis or a civilian like most of those who have held the office.”

It does grant the President the power to “require” from the principal officer in each department his opinion on any subject relating to the duties of his office. “That,” Mr. Miele notes about this all-too-little cited clause, “is all that Cabinet members get — an opinion. They serve at the pleasure of the president, and in no regard should their opinion be elevated above his decision-making authority.”

Exactly. The constitutional prism casts an illuminating light on Mr. Mattis’ most obnoxious sentence, in which the general informs the President that he has the “right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours.” The power of commander in chief to appoint a defense secretary, though, is not limited to those whose views are better aligned with his.

Maybe, after all, Mr. Trump valued having a defense secretary who disagreed with him, against whom he could test his own instincts and any contrary advice he might be getting. In other words, when Mr. Mattis quit, he wasn’t thinking of the President’s prerogatives. He was thinking of his own. He was just dressing it up to look like he was thinking of the President and the country.

One thing Mr. Trump could do is send each of his cabinet secretaries out to Kalispell, Montana, for a retreat to get some perspective on their assignments. Kalispell is the seat of Flathead County, in the northwestern part of Big Sky Country. It’s a long way from the District of Columbia, to be sure, but the air is clear enough that, as Mr. Miele reminds, you can still see the Constitution from there.

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Image: Kalispell, Montana, taken from Lone Pine State Park looking northeast across the Flathead Valley to the peaks inside Glacier National Park. Photograph by Dan Petesch. From Wikipedia, Creative Commons.