Onward radical constitutionalists
In his early years in stand-up comedy, the late George Carlin played more with observational humor, mocking, for example, the internal contradiction in the term “jumbo shrimp.”
What to make now of “radical constitutionalism” (Washington Post):
A battle-tested D.C. bureaucrat and self-described Christian nationalist is drawing up detailed plans for a sweeping expansion of presidential power in a second Trump administration. Russ Vought, who served as the former president’sbudget chief, calls his political strategy for razing long-standing guardrails “radical constitutionalism.”
He has helped craft proposals for Donald Trump to deploy the military to quash civil unrest, seize more control over the Justice Department and assert the power to withhold congressional appropriations — and that’s just on Trump’s first day back in office.
And they called 1960s yippies radicals for having long hair, beards, and for wearing the American flag. Guess they won that culture war. Vought seemingly hasn’t noticed.
“We are living in a post-Constitutional time,” Vought wrote in a seminal 2022 essay, which argued that the left has corrupted the nation’s laws and institutions. Last week, after a jury convicted Trump of falsifying business records, Vought tweeted: “Do not tell me that we are living under the Constitution.”
Vought aims to harness what he calls the “woke and weaponized” bureaucracy that stymied the former president by stocking federal agencies with hardcore disciples who would wage culture wars on abortion and immigration. The proposals championed by Vought and other Trump allies to fundamentally reset the balance of power would represent a historic shift — one they see as a needed corrective.
Tell the guy in the Filipkowski tweet above that he’s out of step with the New Trump Order and in need of correction.
From the Trump campaign’s efforts to distance itself from Vought’s remarks and Center for Renewing America correspondence, what seems obvious is that these proud Christian nationalists believe that they can steer Trump’s agenda in his second term. They believe they can control him the way the Weimar boys “persisted in their delusion that they could control” the loudmouth Austrian with the funny moustache and yet “preserve the ‘guardrails’ that would contain him.” You know, they’ll help Trump exact retribution on his growing enemies list and he, in turn, will help them turn the United States into Gilead, a glorious, new Christian reich.
The Post recounts the failure of people like Vought to get what they wanted from the first Trump administration. But this time it will be different, no doubt about it.
Vought’s long careeras a staffer in Congress and at federal agencies has made himan asset to Project 2025, an initiative led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, to lay the groundwork for a second Trump term. Vought wrote the chapter on the executive office of the president in Project 2025’s 920-page blueprint, and he is developing its playbook for the first 180 days, according to the people involved in the effort.
“We’re going to plant the flags now,” Vought told Trump’s former strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, on his far-right podcast. “It becomes a new governing consensus of the Republican Party.”
Maybe everyone will be ordered to wear two shirts instead of armbands.
As Vought and other Trump allies work on blueprints for a second term,he is pushing a strategy he calls “radical constitutionalism.” The left has discarded the Constitution, Vought argues, so conservatives need to rise up, wrest power from the federal bureaucracy and centralize authority in the Oval Office.
“Our need is not just to win congressional majorities that blame the other side or fill seats on court benches to meddle at the margins,” he wrote in the 2022 essay. “It is to cast ourselves as dissidents of the current regime and to put on our shoulders the full weight of envisioning, articulating, and defending what a Radical Constitutionalism requires in the late hour that our country finds itself in, and then to do it.”
In practice, that could mean reinterpreting parts of the Constitution to achieve policy goals — such as by defining illegal immigration as an “invasion,” which would allow states to use wartime powers to stop it.
“We showed that millions of illegal aliens coming across, and Mexican cartels holding operational control of the border, constitute an invasion,” Vought wrote. “This is where we need to be radical in discarding or rethinking the legal paradigms that have confined our ability to return to the original Constitution.”
As radical as Benedict Arnold, if that’s what it takes. He was an original too.
Vought’s views amount to a kind of Anglo-Protestant cultural supremacism, said Paul D. Miller, a Georgetown University professor who published a book critiquing Christian nationalism.
“The Civil War taught us that America is big and broad and strong enough to include non-Christians and non-Whites,”Miller wrote in an email to The Post. “It also should have taught us that the greatest threat to the American vision are racial and religious supremacists.”
Update: Replaced original image containing copyright watermark.
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