Where Are Trump and Musk Taking Us?
Posted on: Mar 12, 2025 19:57 IST | Posted by: Nytimes
Supported by
Jamelle Bouie
Opinion Columnist
The question of the day is whether the United States is embroiled in a constitutional crisis.
Consider the circumstances. Congress has essentially surrendered its power of the purse to an unelected co-president who has seized control of much of the federal bureaucracy. The actual president has asserted a unilateral executive authority so powerful and far-reaching that it threatens the republican character of the American political system. And that same president has taken actions — such as an attempt to unravel birthright citizenship — that blatantly and flagrantly violate the Constitution.
But as critics of the “crisis” view note, for all of his lawbreaking, transgression and overreach, the president has yet to take the steps that would clearly mark a constitutional crisis — openly defying a lower court order or, more significantly, a judgment of the Supreme Court.
One thing the language of crisis captures, however, is the degree to which the American political system is under a tremendous amount of stress. And to the extent that this stress threatens the integrity of the constitutional order, it is because the American system is, and has been, in a profound state of disrepair. If we are in or approaching a constitutional crisis, it has been a long time coming.
In 2009, the legal scholars Jack M. Balkin and Sanford Levinson published an article on constitutional crises titled, aptly enough, “Constitutional Crises.”
The aim of their argument was to distinguish ordinary (or even extraordinary) political conflict from a breakdown in the operation of the constitutional system itself.
“When constitutional design functions properly — even if people strongly disagree with and threaten each other — there is no crisis,” Balkin and Levinson explain. “On the other hand, when the system of constitutional design breaks down, either because people abandon it or because it is leading them off of the proverbial cliff, disagreements and threats take on a special urgency that deserves the name of ‘crisis.’ ”
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