Not monarchists
Arshad Hasan from Democracy for America’s Campaign Academy (back in the day) told us straight away: You are not normal. Normal people do not spend their weekends learning to run political campaigns. Let me extend that: If you read this blog, you are not normal either. Since these are abnormal times, you are in the right place.
The lesson Arshad meant to convey was not to talk to normal people like you do to other political geeks. They don’t get worked up by things like, say, a constitutional crisis. Too removed from work, kids and shopping. Not even the collapse of the republic breaks through until tanks are blocking the streets or social security checks stop coming.
But for us, the crisis is here. In the course of moving fast and breaking things, Musk-Trump is headed to court(s) over its actions since January 20. At issue is whether the U.S. Supreme Court will sign off on executive overreach (so John Roberts can avoid being ignored) or defy King Donald and actually be ignored.
“We are in the midst of a constitutional crisis right now,” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at UC Berkeley tells The New York Times. “There have been so many unconstitutional and illegal actions in the first 18 days of the Trump presidency. We never have seen anything like this.” He offered a partial list:
It will take some time, though perhaps only weeks, for a challenge to one of Mr. Trump’s actions to reach the Supreme Court. On Monday, a federal judge said the White House had defied his order to release billions of dollars in federal grants, marking the first time a judge has expressly declared that the Trump administration is disobeying a judicial mandate.
It remains to be seen whether Mr. Trump would defy a ruling against him by the justices.
The vice president, at least, is eager to tell the court to take a long walk on a short pier.
Pamela Karlan, a law professor at Stanford, added that a crisis need not arise from clashes between the branches of the federal government.
“It’s a constitutional crisis when the president of the United States doesn’t care what the Constitution says regardless whether Congress or the courts resist a particular unconstitutional action,” she said. “Up until now, while presidents might engage in particular acts that were unconstitutional, I never had the sense that there was a president for whom the Constitution was essentially meaningless.”
Or solemn oaths to preserve, protect and defend it.
So long as there are not tanks in the streets or midnight arrests down the block, normal people will pretend everything is normal.
But it will be difficult to paint over Trump’s usurpation of power from the the legislative and judicial branches of government (many Americans cannot name) if Trump defies SCOTUS. Republicans in Congress are already supine in the face of blatant Musk-Trump lawlessness.
Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia, tells the Times, “the Supreme Court may find it hard to defend the laws Congress enacted against executive usurpation when the Republican-controlled Congress refuses to do the same.”
Even the normies may soon hear an apocryphal saying likely spoken already in the West Wing.
Not all presidents gave the court’s rulings the same respect. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce a Supreme Court decision arising from a clash between Georgia and the Cherokee Nation. A probably apocryphal but nonetheless potent comment is often attributed to Jackson about Chief Justice John Marshall: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”
Even before this weekend, Mr. Vance has said that Mr. Trump should ignore the Supreme Court. In a 2021 interview, he said Mr. Trump should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state” and “replace them with our people.”
It seems unlikely that Republicans suddenly snap out of their cult-trances and demand their power back from Musk-Trump. Democrats in the minority have limited ability to push back legislatively and little stomach for anything more dramatic. Even if Democrats pulled off some kind of attention-getting protest, the king and his henchmen would ignore them, as would normal people.
If things spiral even more out of control, the only force capable of stopping the collapse of republican government is mass public protest. But that will require large numbers of normal people to stop acting like normal people. Close to 90 million normal people stayed home last November. A tad over half of the ones engaged enough to cast ballots voted for monarchy.