Our rights as Americans, public policies that serve and protect us, and limits on the power of a single man to direct the government to inflict harm on us are being smashed to bits.
Meanwhile, scholars and commentators have been debating for weeks about whether we have, or at what point we might, encounter a constitutional crisis. This may be a significant question for theories of constitutional law or political philosophy, but it is hardly clear that it has much import for the rest of us.
In this morning’s New York Times Adam Liptak highlights the views of several legal scholars who shift the focus. For instance:
Aziz Huq, a law professor at the University of Chicago, said that assessing whether a given development is a constitutional crisis is “generally unhelpful.”
“I think it’s more useful to say that this is moving us into a completely different kind of constitutional order, one that’s no longer characterized by laws that bind officials and that can be enforced,” Professor Huq said. “The law, in other words, becomes a tool to harm enemies, but not to bind those who govern. That is a quite different constitutional order from the one that we’ve had for a long time.”
The Project 2025 folks and the billionaires who back them are getting their way. Add Leonard Leo and his funders, countless MAGA enthusiasts on social media, and Republicans in Congress (who are ducking responsibility, but happy to stand back as the destruction unfolds). And let’s give a shout out to the five Republican men – all of whom have devoted their professional lives to advancing the agenda of the Republican Party – in the supermajority on the Roberts Court.
The deliberate destruction continues apace. The harm to Americans and to our country continues to metastasize.