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Are we in a constitutional crisis? (www.npr.org)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

7 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Amanda Frost is a Law Professor at the University of Virginia Law. She says a constitutional crisis occurs when one branch of government, usually the executive, "blatantly, flagrantly and regularly exceeds its constitutional authority — and the other branches are either unable or unwilling to stop it."

Frost says the first half of her definition is already happening, and that it's clear President Trump has gone beyond the powers of the executive branch. She points to him trying to usurp Congress' "power of the purse" or trying to put an end to birthright citizenship as examples.

Considering their willingness to ignore or deliberately misinterpret court orders, I'd argue we've met the second part of the definition...

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

It's somewhere in the mid-30s percentagewise in terms of people who actually want this. Millions just didn't vote, and I'll reluctantly admit to being one of them. But my vote doesn't count at any level.

City passes a reasonable law, Legislature gets called into special session to make said law illegal. Legislature is horrifically gerrymandered, which is particularly rich given they work here.

We insanely don't have term limits, so the same three old white dudes, one of whom -- the fucking attorney general, who has been under federal indictment since I moved to Texas 10 years ago -- are running the state as when I arrived. Texas does not hold elections so much as performative theatre.

We needn't go into the value of my vote at the federal level. You can't just vote harder.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

That is what makes the stuff going on at the federal level so difficult to try to deal with: our democracy was already broken long before this all happened, and all up and down the scale from federal down to county.

Biden was corrupt, now Trump even more so, but are we going to convince people to expend enormous efforts merely to shift from the latter back to the former? I would hope so, but so far I'm not seeing anything happening. Which does not mean that it won't, and yet like you say... how much stuff is merely performance. I think Bernie Sanders really means it, but even so... I cannot escape the feeling that this level of rhetoric won't be enough.