We're In A 60% Constitutional Crisis

For the newbs, Matt reads the top story in the morning’s paper edition of the New York Times every day, then digests it for you here with a dash — or even modicum — of wit so that the experience of being news literate is slightly less likely to make you want to kill yourself in 2025. If you walked in here by accident, as Matt’s vicar often says, then “we’re glad that you found your way among us” and you can subscribe for daily updates. Or just enjoy the read. I’m at your service!

Today’s lead story is by the same author of the lead story yesterday, and on the same subject. Yesterday, you may recall, reporter Mattathias Schwartz, who once had the good fortune to buy me dinner, wrote about attorneys general around the U.S. suing the Trump administration over its executive orders. Today he writes about the first ruling by a Federal Judge, saying explicitly that “the Trump White House was disobeying a judicial mandate.” You can read the story online here.

The Judge ruled in late January that the White House must release billions of dollars in federal grants. His order, he wrote yesterday, was “clear and unambiguous, and there are no impediments to the Defandants’ compliance with it.”

It’s a bit like when my mum used to say “Now, Matthew.” After I’d ignored one of her edicts. Trump’s attorneys have done a bad thing, though, and appealed. Evidently they never met my mother.

The White House says:

Whatever the delightfully named Harrison “Don’t Picture Me In This Outfit” Fields says, this is not business as usual.

As Schwartz explains, “the legal actions on Monday marked a step toward what could evolve quickly into a high-stakes showdown between the executive and judicial branches, a day after a social media post by Vice President JD Vance claimed that ‘judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power’.”

And there’s the big two words.

Constitutional crisis.

Although it seems that the Trump administration might not quite be willing to go that far. The piece quotes a conservative activist attacking, ironically, “activist judges”, then Rob Bonta, the attorney general of California, who yesterday was quoted talking about being on a conference call while “trying to be a Dad.”

“No administration is above the law,” Bonta is quoted as saying, this morning, evidently having gone for the media training I recommended yesterday.

But the question “looming over Washington,” Schwartz reports, “is how Mr. Trump will respond.”

What a sick burn. The question looming over us all, I guess, is whether saying you have the power to ignore the Constitution makes it so?

The showdown in the courts is part of a broader effort to get congressionally approved funds flowing again. If the judge finds that the administration is still ignoring his order, he could punish officials, technically with imprisonment or fines. But that’s never going to happen. Georgetown law professor David Super has a nice quote, illustrating that the Rhode Island judge is showing restraint.

Restraint. That’s not a concept I’ve come to associate with the president. But we’ll see how all this plays out. Another front-page story this morning with a whopping five bylines features Trump’s administration telling federal prosecutors in New York to drop charges against Mayor Eric Adams. Apparently by trying to prosecute Adams so close to the 2025 mayoral primary, the prosecutors “limited [Adams’] ability to cooperate in President Trump’s immigration crackdown.”

That’s not the best reasoning in the world. If they’d prosecuted Sweeney Todd, it might have interfered with my ability to get a nice shave. It’s problematic because again it shows disrespect for the court system.

There’s another story on the front page by Adam Liptak quoting a variety of legal scholars debating whether the U.S. is, indeed, actually, in a “constitutional crisis.” The crux of the story is in the lede:

Right now my judgement is that we’re in, like, a 6 out of 10 constitutional crisis when you average out the opinions of the various scholars. It’s a beast of a story that extends all over page 15, and the upshot is that most Americans are expecting the U.S. Supreme Court — despite being stacked heavily in Mr. Trump’s favor — to issue a rebuke. But then what?

J.D. Vance has cited President Andrew Jackson, who in 1832, said he’d ignore a Supreme Court decision. Jackson famously said that the Chief Justice, John Marshall, “has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” Here’s Vance quoted in the article from 2021:

Rhetorically, that’s the opposite of restraint. I’m also trying to imagine what might have happened if I’d used similar language about my mother when she told me to, say, clean up my room. To quote BBC funk and soul DJ Craig Charles’s favorite phrase, I think she would have told me to “fetch the slipper.”

The question in Donald Trump’s case is who gets a slippering, and who’s in the best position to administer one, if not the U.S. Supreme Court? And whether in his case a good slippering might be more like this than what you had in mind:

Meanwhile I’ll close with this Tweet from a comedian watching the Super Bowl, which I’ve been enjoying heartily since I saw it:

You’re welcome.

Matt Davis lives in Manhattan with his wife and kid.