Her campaign, responding with the transparency, openness and candor for which it is famous, initially downplays the incident, saying that Clinton felt “overheated.”

Mr. Obama’s action also was hardly a usurpation of Congress’s prerogatives, despite some of the overheated rhetoric from the president’s critics.

There is nothing unscientific about experimenting on human subjects, designing nuclear weapons or guiding the search for more fossil fuels on an overheated planet.