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…
And half the nation wants this. Not merely are apathetic, but like has been (literally) training with guns to help make sure it happens.
That makes me curious: is this an unprecedented situation? I have not read enough to know for sure but I mostly heard about the rise of fascism involving lack of resistance, not the strength of the movement pushing it. But surely there must have been quite some power behind the push as well, to overcome whatever resistance did manage to rear up?
Half is one of those statistical lies that get thrown around as true. Half(ish) that voted, voted for trump. It’s more like 1/3 of the country voted for trump.
Then you have to get to why each voter voted this way. Most people would say grocery prices, or my money is not going as far. Or maybe some other single issue thing. Many of them thought the more outlandish promises wouldn’t come to pass. That’s why we have trump voters with their spouse picked up by ice. Or their farm about to be bought up by foreign interests.
Saying that half the nation wants this gives these guys too much power. I mean they are taking enough power already. Let’s not cement the idea that these moves are popular.
Quantitatively you are definitely correct. Something like 80% of the nation is in the middle rather than at the two extreme ends and probably could care less and maybe even after the last few weeks still has not even so much as heard a little bit about what is going on.
But qualitatively I think you are wrong: they are though, maybe not “half the nation” popular but most of the wording used in the past by liberals to describe the situation has turned out to be untrue, like poor people don’t “think of themselves as temporarily displaced millionaires” (in fairness that one likely used to be true in the past, as e.g. people worked during their lives and then “no longer needed to work” aka retired near the end), but rather that millionaires legit deserve their wealth even as they themselves deserve to be poor.
Talking with regular people, it’s not virtually none of them that are actively cheering the actions on - these aren’t entirely made-up poll stats. But yeah, neither is it half, I just don’t have any clue what it really is, and yet in the past I thought it was closer to half. You have a good point but I think the reality is somewhere in-between these moves being popular vs… what, ignored, unpopular, etc.
Anyway, whatever percentage it is, some people are ecstatic about what they are hearing is happening from conservative media sources.
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.
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.