Donald Trump is back in the Oval Office, and you know what that means. It’s another constitutional crisis – or maybe it’s a nonstop series of crises cascading one after the other. It’s hard to tell, really. In any case, it’s time for leftists to start foaming at the mouth again and throwing that phrase around whenever the president does something they don’t like. But what is a constitutional crisis – and how is it America managed to survive his first four years in the White House if he’s such a threat to the fabric of America? As seems to be the case so often with Democrats and their favorite made-up political terms, it depends on what the meaning of “is” is. As retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer told CNN recently when asked what it really means, “No one really knows. People have different views on that.”
Constitutional Crisis – Let’s Define Our Terms
Trying to pick just one definition of the term simply based on how it has been applied over the last decade or so would be a fool’s errand. Since Trump first began campaigning for the 2016 election, his opponents (generally the Democrats) have thrown that phrase around so frequently that just about the only thing the various instances have in common is that they’re the ones using it, and Trump is their target. However, if one were hoping to find a less cynical – or less potentially biased – meaning, there are still a few options that make sense.
A panel of Harvard Law professors met in February to answer this question and to assess whether we’re there yet. “I think you only start calling something a constitutional crisis if the Constitution is not equipped to handle what is happening,” argued Ruth Greenwood, an assistant clinical professor and director of Harvard Law School’s Election Law Clinic. That makes sense: A situation in which there is no constitutional recourse could be called a constitutional crisis.
Another possible meaning that makes logical, contextual sense would be when legislation, executive actions, or court rulings blatantly defy the Constitution and are allowed to stand anyway. A third possible type of crisis might be anything that threatens the Constitution itself. And, of course, as mentioned before, there’s the more rhetorical, even frivolous application of the term: anything with which the person saying it disagrees.
The Proof of the Pudding
Back when President Trump was just Number 45, Democrats and media pundits alike used the term frequently. They decried his appointment of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general following the resignation of Jeff Sessions. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) called this an attempt to obstruct Congress’ investigation into so-called collusion with Russia – and declared it a constitutional crisis. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) called Whitaker an “assassin” sent to “come in and take it out.” Crises and assassins? The president appointed someone to fill a position that serves at the president’s pleasure – a power granted to him by the Constitution. And the alleged crime for which he was being investigated? It wasn’t illegal. Chalk that one up to the more politically biased definition of constitutional crisis: stuff Democrats don’t like.
Flash forward, and we see Joe Biden’s executive branch secretly commanding social media companies to flag posts that run counter to the official COVID-19 narrative. Does this violate the First Amendment? If that doesn’t cross the line, it walks it like a tightrope.
The various federal gun control laws, from the 1930s to the 2020s, seem to completely ignore the language of the Second Amendment. No right is absolute, argued the Democrats who wrote and passed these bills – yet the verbiage here was, in fact, absolute. “Shall not be infringed” in the Second Amendment was not followed by a clause of exceptions. When Congress and the president ignore the plain language of the Constitution to pass laws contrary to it, is that not a crisis?
How about the Supreme Court creating a privacy guarantee from the language of the 14th Amendment, which does not, either explicitly or even implicitly, mention the issue at all? From there, justices jumped to establishing a right to kill unborn children as a valid expression of that privacy. This one straddles the line between ignoring the Constitution and attacking it directly. Yet when the nearly 50-year-old Roe v. Wade ruling was overturned in 2022 by the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, Democrats yet again howled about a constitutional crisis.
As for cases where the Constitution doesn’t provide a way to handle issues, consider the various secession movements across the nation in the past decade or so. Colorado, California, Illinois, Texas, and several other states have seen large-scale attempts to secede. What happens if one of these eventually gains enough traction to require an actual vote – and then passes?
While it could be argued that the Declaration of Independence serves as all the framework a state needs to leave the Union, the Constitution only addresses adding new states – not getting rid of old ones or allowing them to leave. That’s a literal constitutional crisis, fitting the definition laid out by the Harvard professors last month, and the last time it happened, the nation suffered several years of bloody civil war.
What about an amendment that fails to meet its ratification requirements but is recorded in the federal register anyway? That is what Biden and the Democrats pushed for with the Equal Rights Amendment – and it could still happen some day. It’s also what many claimed occurred with the 16th Amendment, which allowed the government to establish a permanent income tax.
After the Supreme Court ruled against President Biden’s vaccine mandate, the former chief executive tried to restructure the Court by imposing an ethics code drafted by Democrats. He wanted to remove the lifetime appointment of justices, limiting terms to 18 years, and pack the Court with progressive justices appointed by – you guessed it – him.
These certainly fall into the “threatening the Constitution” category – or, in the latter case, at least a threat to the body assigned to interpret its application – and the founding document lacks verbiage to prevent either. Constitutional crisis?
More recently, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) says Trump is instigating yet another constitutional crisis by calling for the impeachment of a judge who ruled against him. Democrats call the stripping of USAID funds and the laying off of Department of Education employees constitutional crises. Yet somehow, after looking at so many examples of real crises imposed by left-wing ideologues either trying to circumvent or attack the Constitution, these actions by Trump don't seem so dire.
