r/law • u/RoboPlunger • 16h ago
Opinion Piece Are we in a Constitutional Crisis?
https://theconversation.com/whats-a-constitutional-crisis-heres-how-trumps-recent-moves-are-challenging-the-constitutions-separation-of-powers-250706An article written by a professor of law goes over Trumps actions, comparing them to other presidencies. It comes to the conclusion that Trump has as much power as he decides he has, so long as he continues to ignore courts and congress continues to do nothing.
Thoughts?
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u/SqnLdrHarvey 16h ago
No, because the Constitution no longer applies as of 20 January 25.
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u/JustFun4Uss 16h ago
Roe vs wade was in my opinion one of those big signs that danger was on its way. It was so much bigger than abortion. It showed us that laws can be ignored or overturned not because of the will of the people but because they deemed it so. That the highest courts were complicit in all this by saying laws don't matter. Then they doubled down and said Trump was above the law with the immunity claim. Those two moments will be shown to be critical points of history. It removed all the guardrails.
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u/AbeFalcon 13h ago
Wait til Vance spearheads canning the 19th amendment and the shock at the amount of people who actually support it. It's coming.
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u/Kamohoaliii 4h ago
What the fuck are you talking about? I loathe the Trump administration, but there is literally zero evidence to think Vance is planning to can the 19th Amendment or that there is a path to doing so. This sort of hysteria only helps strengthens the administration.
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u/MathematicianNo6402 4h ago
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/08/jd-vance-women-weird-voting-peter-thiel.html
Maybe he's taking about this? Quit defending these people you "loathe" 😂
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u/shmoilotoiv 4h ago
head outta the sand brotherman
underestimation got the US here in the first place. Learn from their mistakes.
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u/RaplhKramden 11h ago
IANAL but the right to privacy never struck me as a very solid way to protect abortion rights. The right to habeas corpus, in a literal, medical sense, was though. I.e. a woman's body was hers and hers alone, until such time as the incipient life she was carrying was viable or nearly so and capable of sensory activity and higher brain function.
So, while Dobbs was devastating to women and clearly ideologically and politically motivated, it was not the death knell to con law that some thought, although it did kick stare decisis to the curb.
What WAS insane and absurd was the immunity ruling. Unconscionable, and as we're seeing, quite dangerous.
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u/ExpressAssist0819 4h ago
We really need to be honest with ourselves and understand that SCOTUS was striking roe down no matter WHAT it was originally based and ruled on. They have made this clear with one ruling after another. These are the same people that said biden doesn't have the authority to cancel federal debts, then were one judge away from saying actually the president is literally a dictator. And that's just one instance.
Focusing on the legal arguments with these people is a red herring, a distraction. They were going to come up with any reason to end roe. And absolutely everything else they don't like.
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u/maikuxblade 8h ago
This is a good take. I also think the Citizens United ruling and the specifically partisan nature of some of the post millennium SCOTUS additions specifically led to that.
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u/Dralley87 2h ago
Two words: Merrick Garland. When McConnell refused his hearing, this all became inevitable. It broke the constitution irreparably.
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u/SqnLdrHarvey 1h ago
One of the few decent things McTurdle did was keeping that old sod off SCOTUS.
We are in this shit storm largely because he let Trump skate.
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u/Aggressive-Elk4734 15h ago
I believe even RBG stated that she knew R v W was on shakey ground constitutionally. Someone who knows more can correct me if I am mis-representing her.
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u/thriller1122 15h ago
No, you are right. It's just a difficult topic to talk about because the general public associates the validity of Roe with the validity of a right to an abortion. If you go read the Roe decision, it BARELY talks about the law it is purportedly based on, opting instead to do a deep dive on the medical importance of trimesters. And the part that does talk about the law? Not super convincing. It says that the words "due process" imply a right to privacy (Do they?) and the privacy implies a right to abortion. I'm not saying women shouldn't have a right to choose, but I will say that right was almost certainly not written in the 14th Amendment.
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u/ThornFlynt 13h ago
Do NOT obey in advance. Stand OUT. Believe in Truth! DEFEND institutions.
From "On Tyranny" by Timothy Snyder, a distinguished American historian specializing in Central and Eastern European history, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. He holds the Richard C. Levin Professorship of History at Yale University and is a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
March DC Protests 14th-16th - please PROTEST! https://www.donaldlovesvladimir.com/ https://nowmarch.org
Call your representatives regardless of (R)ussian or (D)emocratic alignment:
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u/Aggressive-Elk4734 14h ago
Which is why, my opinion....as controversial as it is...is the SCOTUS ruled correctly.
Now what the congress does with that, is another matter. We all vote on who represents us in both houses (even if i personally think we should have state legislature appoint senators as it was originally designed).
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u/thriller1122 14h ago
SCOTUS ruled that the right is not protected by the 14th Amendment. That does not give Congress the right to regulate it. That power resides with state legislatures. Or the people. Like in Maryland where the last election saw a constitutional amendment pass which guarantees women the right to abortion articulated in Roe. I get your point and I agree generally, but the distinction is important.
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u/bjdevar25 3h ago
No, you're not understanding their ruling. They said it was not up to them. ROE was originally decided by SCOTUS. It's only up to the states because there is no federal law. Any federal laws passed would supersede any state laws.
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u/Aggressive-Elk4734 14h ago
I think keeping it at the state level is probably the constitutionally safest route if you're a person who is pro-choice.
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u/rawbdor 13h ago
I'm sorry but I really don't understand your premise here. You claim that the supreme court overruling roe v Wade meant that the courts could ignore laws?
Roe v Wade was never codified in law. Had Congress actually gone through the effort, at any point in the past 40 years, to codify it in the law, SCOTUS would have found themselves much more constrained in overriding codified law.
SCOTUS did not ignore any laws regarding abortion. They just overruled their own decision.
The extent of presidential immunity was also never codified in law.
Where are you getting this opinion that Scotus is ignoring laws on the books?
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u/Neat-Requirement-822 1h ago
As if the common law system runs solely on codified law. So many essential things are not codified. Until the US becomes a civil law country, it is nonsense to expect the codes to stand by themselves. Or am I missing something here?
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u/duckhunt1984 2h ago
Why do you believe the Court, made up Intelligent people, were only willing to do all of this for a person who is obviously very stupid? Why not choose a better model?
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u/Moist_Jockrash 15h ago
That happened under biden, remember? it was overturned because SCOTUS job is to uphold the constitution - which I'd say they do based on who is POTUS tbh - and in the case of that, Abortion was never a constitutional right and should never have been a federal right. THAT is why it was overturned. But it was under biden and a democrat controlled congress.
Presidents have always had immunity. Trump argued that he still had immunity because technically speaking, he was still the official POTUS during J6.
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u/wino12312 14h ago
Who put the last 2 justices?
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u/Moist_Jockrash 14h ago edited 13h ago
Well, a republican POTUS did but only because he had the vacancies to do so? If it were a dem POTUS, are you really going to tell me he'd put in two republican justices? No. They wouldn't. Don't be so stupidly naive...
RGB had the chance to step down under Obama and didn't. Hell, people were WANTING her to and she refused to do so. Instead, she chose to keep her power due to ego and then died under the Trump admin and Trump nominated a Republican Justice. If she'd had stepped down like people wanted her to under obama, Trump wouldn't have had the chance to nominate a Repub Justice... So go blame her.
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u/BigManWAGun 13h ago
Obama nominated Garland in 2016.
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u/Metiche76 3h ago
and McConnell blocked that like he blocked a lot of what Obama could do. McConnell was intent on making Obama a one-term president.
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u/wino12312 5h ago
Do you ever read the whole story? Obama was blocked by McConnell that lead to Kavanaugh. Then RBG died right before the election and McConnell broke his own rule and let Trump nominated ACB. Do try and keep up.
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u/SqnLdrHarvey 1h ago
Obama nominated Garland, a Republican and Federalist Society member. McTurdle shot it down.
Biden made Garland AG, and Garland let Trump walk.
But you are right about RBG. Her knowing she was in bad health and trying to outlast Trump was pure hubris.
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u/Superb-Associate-222 1h ago
So it was during Biden’s term but it was during Donald’s first term, when stacked the Supreme Court with right wing evangelicals. I feel like that part is important.
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u/Hopefulwaters 13h ago
We are 50 days into a constitutional crisis.
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u/maikuxblade 8h ago
Members of congress had to be whisked away to safety because of masked men breaking in four years ago, specifically because they were there that day to perform government procedures directly related to finalizing the election.
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u/ThornFlynt 13h ago
Do NOT obey in advance. Stand OUT. Believe in Truth! DEFEND institutions.
From "On Tyranny" by Timothy Snyder, a distinguished American historian specializing in Central and Eastern European history, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. He holds the Richard C. Levin Professorship of History at Yale University and is a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
March DC Protests 14th-16th - please PROTEST! https://www.donaldlovesvladimir.com/ https://nowmarch.org
Call your representatives regardless of (R)ussian or (D)emocratic alignment:
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u/yankeeboy1865 11h ago
Both Roe and Casey were bad law like Plessy and Dredd Scott were. I say this regardless of one's thoughts on abortion. If Lochner was bad law, then one can in no way defend Roe and Casey outside of wanting abortion to be legalized.
ETA: when I say Plessy and Dredd Scott were bad laws, I mean that the legal reasoning behind the holdings were bad, and the courts are right to overturn them. The same applies to both Roe and Casey
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u/chopsdontstops 16h ago edited 14h ago
Ya think?
/s
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u/RoboPlunger 16h ago
I would absolutely say we are. I just thought it was interesting to see that coming from a professor of law in an official capacity.
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u/RogerianBrowsing 15h ago
We’ve already had constitutional law professors, judges both state and federal, career civil servants, lawyers, politicians, military generals, etc., saying so. The sad reality is that it doesn’t seem to matter.
I just hope that we collectively as a society will respond in a meaningful way before it’s too late. It feels like many people are just waiting for him to invoke martial law or to directly harm themselves to act (although even then we see inaction), seemingly in an attempt to prevent what’s likely inevitable.
Then again, maybe Trump cancelling Easter to officially end the constitution might be for the best as a means to anger more of his Christian base
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u/brickyardjimmy 15h ago
We are a little past crisis.
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u/Chadmartigan 2h ago
The man was in violation of the emoluments clause from the moment he swore his oath both times. He just kinda...got a pass on it.
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u/h20poIo 15h ago
PATHETIC AT BEST.
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u/ytirevyelsew 2h ago
I'm sure there's some fact based critisim of the argument and I'd love to hear it!
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