No, #Trump isn't causing a constitutional crisis. The Constitution has mechanisms in place to address everything that's happening here. There's no crisis, there's just a need to apply the constitutional order.
But, I just keep thinking that #Democrats yelling constitutional crisis must be referring to their own crisis wherein the Constitution just doesn't provide them with the tools to impose their political preferences on the country after voters rejected them.
It's a crisis of party, not of Constitution.
They should put forward better candidates than this.
Again, the reason we are not in the constitutional crisis is because the constitution provides mechanisms to address where we are today. We are still within the rulebooks.
It doesn't matter whether we like it or not, whether we prefer it or not, whether we like such and such a policy, whether such and such is outdated, any of that.
Like it or not, the current state of affairs is within the rulebook, so there is no crisis.
@volkris I am taking the empirical, practical point of view of Constitutional Crises. You are taking a theoretical point of view.
Under theory there is always the path of amendment, and thus under the theory approach there can never be a Constitutional Crisis.
Under the practical point of view we have reached a point where the gears of SCOTUS decisions (such as immunity) have as a practical matter made resolution within the Constitutional structure effectively impossible while actual harms and violations of Constitutional rights to actual people are happening with effective impunity.
@karlauerbach No, you have it exactly backwards!
No I'm not talking theory at all. I'm talking that there are substantial procedures that the US government has for addressing the complaints that people are bringing up. We don't need any sort of constitutional amendment, we have plenty of room for Congress to act, for example.
In fact, most of these very substantial, extremely non-theoretical procedures do go through Congress. Whether we elect people that use those procedures or not is a different matter, and it's up to us to hold them accountable for what they do in Congress.
This isn't theory. The Constitution as it is, without needing to talk about amendment, provides pathways to resolution, so there is no crisis. It's just voters voting for representatives to hopefully do what we expect them to do.
And if they don't? Well the Constitution gives us that power to vote against our interests if we want to.
@volkris We are going to have to disagree.
I agree that on paper there are mechanisms that could be used. But those mechanisms - such as elections for Congress members - are being undermined by SCOTUS, states, and a Federal executive who does not want elections that give "undesired" results. SCOTUS has crippled the Civil Rights Act, FFOTUS won't enforce the remainder, and Congress and the states are rapidly removing the state and Federal voting franchise.
Just take a look at Lessig's book "How To Steal A Presidential Election" to see how the system has become a tool to coerce Presidential election outcomes.
Congress has delegated so much authority to the President - and abandoned the practical ability to retract that power - that many of the controls - such as the power of the purse - are effectively gone.
@karlauerbach My experience tells me that all of these stories of stolen elections-- including the stories promoted by Trump to be sure-- amount to to over the top conspiracy theories without much actual backing.
People actually do vote for these congresspeople, for some reason. I mean, yeah out of ignorance, but that's democracy for you.
Like you point out, Congress has delegated a lot of authority, and it has done that over the course of years and years. It's not like that's something that happened last year through some sort of anomaly or stolen election, no we have been voting for congressmen who have been doing that for generations now. We asked for it. So we got it.
That it's been going on for so long reinforces the idea that no, the elections weren't stolen. The American people really did vote for that shift through their representatives.
And so, no constitutional crisis, just the mechanisms in place to give us what we vote for. This is the system working the way it is supposed to work, even if that means giving the people a really bad situation, because if that's what the people want, well again, yay democracy.
@volkris I rather disagree - my feeling is that we are deep into a Constitutional crisis.
It is a crisis that came from three converging factors: First was that the Constitution was created in an agrarian world with a well established administrative/ruling class. Second was that since then governance has gotten far more complex with the rise of administrative agencies that don't fit well into the original 3-branch structure. Third has been the reaction of Congress (assisted by SCOTUS) to react to that rise of administrative complexity by handing authority to the executive branch without strong limits.
It is interesting that FFOTUS is picking up and using that administrative authority delegation at the same time that SCOTUS is yanking it back (by revoking the Chevron deference policy.)
Yes, the D's blew things badly. But the Constitutional structural weakness has been growing for two centuries. And now those weaknesses have essentially erased the power of all but the Executive branch.