I'm Anna Martin, the host of the Modern Love podcast. In every episode, we peek into an intimate corner of someone's life and learn about what love means to them. You know, I can tell you, 35 years with another person, I've never spent that much time with anyone else either. So we both kind of said I love you pretty fast. My advice is that it's okay if it's hard. You can listen to Modern Love wherever you get your podcasts.
From New York Times Opinion, I'm Carlos Lozada. I'm Michelle Cole. And this is Matter of Opinion, where thoughts are always allowed. So. I am glad to be back this week, but alas, Ross is the one who is away this time. We're not just trying to avoid each other, I promise. Fortunately, we are joined instead by two of our opinion colleagues, Jamel Bowie and David French. Welcome to both of you. Thank you for having us. Thanks so much.
I'm just grateful they would return having done this before. Yeah, David's a recent returnee. This is impressive. Well, I just love hanging out with you guys. So, you know, anytime, anytime. So I'm especially excited that you're here with me and with Michelle today because I want to know what you think about a term that has been everywhere this week. Let me give you some sample headlines from CNN.
As Trump team overhauls government, constitutional crisis looms. From the Washington Post, in Trump's actions, opponents see more than cuts. They see a constitutional crisis. And our very own New York Times. Trump's actions have created a constitutional crisis, scholars say. I love that scholars say it so.
thoughtful and careful. So constitutional crisis is in the air in our politics. Remember how in the first Trump term every week was infrastructure week? I'm going to dub this our first official constitutional crisis week. um david jamel i know you've been thinking a lot about this lately so we're going to get into all of that now are we in a constitutional crisis what are the opposing visions at play and is this 230
plus year old piece of parchment up to the challenge. Does that sound like a plan? So good. Yes. Love it. So first, the scope of the problem here. David, you recently wrote that President Trump is launching a constitutional revolution and that.
defenders of the constitution are facing a legal hydra so tell us about the heads of the hydra what are the different elements of this revolution in kind of a practical sense yeah you know one thing that people have been talking about is this kind of shock and awe moment at the start of the Trump administration that can feel overwhelming because there's so many different things coming in at the same time from birthright citizenship to.
aid cutoffs to ending DEI programs. And it's extremely difficult for one person to keep up with all of these different elements, much less formulate informed opinions about each different piece of it. And each different piece of it is being litigated, but I think it's a mistake to focus on all of the different pieces, as important as each individual element might be.
but to understand the core of what's happening. That's why I use the term hydra is you have one body, but many heads and the one body. is this Trump move to radically remake the presidency in the constitutional order, to place the presidency at the unquestioned head of the constitutional order with all the other branches. decisively subordinate to it. And all of these different heads are advancing different aspects of a
kind of underlying legal idea. In this arena, say citizenship or immigration, I'm asserting total control. In this arena, whether it's about diversity, equity, inclusion or something else, I'm exerting total control. It's just. Area after area after area of the federal government, he's trying to exert total control. And that's the common thread that runs through it all. Jamel, you wrote that calling this a constitutional crisis actually understates the magnitude.
of what is going on. So to you, what is the nature of the crisis? I'd say the nature of the crisis, along the lines, as what David is describing, is an attempt to kind of unbound. the presidency from the constitution. I don't think this is so much an attempt to remake the system and making the president the unquestioned.
head of a so recognizable constitutional system. I think this is an attempt to unbound the presidency entirely. For me, the key thing happening here is the administration's insistence. that it can simply freeze whatever spending Congress authorizes and appropriates, which cuts directly against Congress's sort of explicit power over the purse. In itself, represents an unusual kind of vision of what the presidency is.
as something akin to a sovereign, right? And sovereignty in the political theory sense is the, the sovereign is the entity that sort of has like the full and total authority over the polity. And in the American system, Poverency belongs with the people.
But what Trump seems to really be asserting is that he is actually, in the presidency, sovereign over the entire government. And that simply is something that cannot exist within the Constitution. Like, the Constitution is explicitly... anti that and so establishing that to my mind means that you're establishing something that is no longer constitutional government whatever we're going to call it
Building off of what Jamel is talking about, one of the things that I find kind of most unsettling, but I guess not terribly surprising given what we've seen in recent years, is the way that the Congress... led by Republicans in both chambers, has just basically rolled over for this. And I find this particularly rich with someone like Senator Mike Lee of Utah, who...
Back, I remember back in the day in the run-up to the 2016 election, he was on an Article I crusade. He wanted to take back Congress's power of the purse. You know, he's a smart... guy. He comes from a family where his dad argued cases before the Supreme Court. He knows this stuff. And yet now he's pushing legislation to repeal the Impoundment Act so that the president can do whatever he wants to. with what Congress has appropriated. It's a complete 180, and he is not the only fella out there.
pulling this stunt because suddenly his team's in charge and he's willing to forgive everything as long as he thinks it's going to benefit the Republican Party. So I am completely, I guess. Shocked doesn't do it. I am completely disappointed in what is happening. And yet this is sort of what we saw in the first administration as well. The abdication of Congress's role is, I agree, is just really remarkable, right? Congress appropriates the money. The executive is bound.
to spend it. But it's not just Lee, like the Speaker of the House said this week that, you know, there's a presupposition in America. The commander in chief will be a good steward of taxpayer dollars. You know, period. He agrees wholeheartedly, quote unquote, with the notion that Trump can just sort of unilaterally make these these decisions on spending.
So I think that element, right, like when you have a quote unquote constitutional crisis, it's the president trying to push something through in the face of opposition. with a recalcitrant Congress. Here he has congressional majorities, not huge, but he has them. And he could conceivably try to make some of these changes through legislation, but he's not even trying to do that.
Well, that's exactly right. He's not doing it through legislation. What's so difficult about this is that he's busting through constitutional doctrines. His core members of this team, like Russ Vaught, has been out there saying essentially that.
A couple hundred years of precedents have to be swept away. J.D. Vance, for a long time, has openly said presidents can defy the Supreme Court, for example. And he's breaking through this for sort of the equivalent of... a bag of fake magic beans, because all of this power that he's trying to exert, the next president will possess that same power and can immediately eradicate.
executive order after executive order. Now, it's very hard to unwind some things. So, for example, if Trump unwind USAID completely unilaterally, spooling that back up again is hard. But you begin to see how that Trump vision. It's not a Trump vision necessarily of permanent policy change.
It's because he's advancing a lot of vaporware. Executive orders are the, you know, if you're looking at the hierarchy of federal laws are among the least consequential in that hierarchy, well below statute, well below regulatory reform. But he is. blitzing through the constitutional order for the sake of this vaporware. And then you you start to see, OK, let's think practically if he.
succeeds in asserting and gaining and grabbing this much power, the next president is somebody who can be the next bull in the China shop. Where are we going to be constantly unwinding and rebuilding agencies? Are we going to be... constantly legislating by proclamation and then unlegislating by reverse proclamation. This is not how you run a country.
creating not just power for Trump in the short term, it's creating inherent instability in our system over the long term. So, Jamal, I want your take on this because my strong sense is that there have been people in Trump world. You know, Bill Barr during the first administration wanted a very strong executive. There may be people who think in terms of theory, but my sense is that Trump likes instability.
If it serves what is his only goal, which is to maximize his personal power. So he doesn't think in terms of. what this means for the Constitution or what this means for the next president or whatever. His only goal is to amass as much power so he can do whatever he wants to do. And if that seems to work in the short term for some of his people, great. But that's not what he's worried about. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a fair view of.
Trump's perspective. You know, I would note when I'm feeling sort of dark about all of this that, you know, maybe there's a reason why they're acting like there's no one coming after them. But one thing I want to say is that This reliance on perceived executive authority, and I'm glad David made the point that executive orders exist on sort of like the low point of the hierarchy for things that have legal force. And I think...
One of my gripes, you might say, with I think a lot of reporting around president's executive orders is that they're talked about as if they are like royal decrees, and they're not talked about recognizing the... the limited force that they have. But that's an aside. The main point I want to make is that Trump is a weak president, was in his first term.
Why is he not going through Congress? Because Trump does not possess the actual skills and abilities necessary to broker any kind of congressional deal or compromise, even with members of his own party. There's a very famous book, Presidential Power, by a very famous political scientist, Neustadt. I always forget his first name. The point he makes is that the president's power is, in a lot of ways, simply a power to persuade, a power to cajole.
Precisely because the president isn't like the general of the entire federal government. The president is like one constitutional actor among many and has like a limited sphere of authority. But Trump has never been good at this. I always...
like to note that like there's exactly one major piece of legislation that come out of the trump administration the first time it was a big tax cut and that was mostly negotiated by paul ryan and mitch mcconnell right like trump's kind of like signed the bill
and that was it and so when it comes to something like this department of governmental efficiency right A stronger president might say, I want Elon Musk to do a total reorganization of the executive branch, so I'm going to have him make recommendations. And then I'm going to go to Congress and I'm going to say, these are our recommendations. I'd like you to turn this into law. And then the White House would work with congressional majorities and try to...
put together legislation that could get through both chambers and pass. That's what like a normal, competent president would do. And that's significant because if you do it that way, it's a lasting and effectively permanent change. But because Trump doesn't have these skills, and because he's surrounded by people, frankly, who are sort of high on their own supply, who are like Tony Montana at the end of Scarface, they, in their vision...
They can simply assert this authority, assert this power, and then steamroll over everyone who says that they can't do it. This works. For as long as other political actors, and I include judges in that, are somehow cowed by the notion that this represents kind of like the undivided will of the people.
But that's a very tenuous thing on which to rest, any kind of assertion of power, in part because the undivided will of the people is not a thing that exists. It's like a mystical thing that you make up to make a political point, but it doesn't exist in a practical sense. So, David, I want to get you to address this, taking a step back from blaming Trump as a weak president and talk about the fact that for years now, predating Trump.
People have been complaining that Congress has been abdicating its responsibility for all kinds of things, in part because they don't want to be blamed for tough decisions on, say... foreign affairs or immigration or things like that. And so they have kind of happily handed over a lot of their responsibility to the president, well, predating Trump. I mean, and again, it's. Not just that Trump is a weak president, it's that Congress.
hasn't wanted to take responsibility for legislating in a really long time. And I remember complaining at the beginning of the Biden administration that they were doing a lot of executive orders because there was no way they were going to get anything through Congress on. certain issues. So in addition to blaming Trump, I'd like to just take a step back and slap the Congress again for putting us in a position where this is kind of what people have come to expect.
Oh, Congress deserves so much blame here. And look, Congress deserves blame, but... Also, Congress is rationally responding to incentives now by rationally responding to incentives. They're placing a lot of our constitutional order in jeopardy. But here's what I mean. We live in a nation right now.
where the congressional districts are heavily, heavily, heavily gerrymandered. And also through sort of our big sort, our own voluntary ideological sorting that we're undergoing. We're living in very gerrymandered America. And so we're living in that reality where a very low percentage of members of Congress really have to worry about the opposing party at all.
And so what do they have to worry about? They have to worry about the basis political checklist and essentially an ideological and political purity test is what they undergo, certainly in the House every two years and the Senate every six years. And so in that circumstance. compromise becomes fatal to your political career. And so what is it that, you know, in the words of Madison, ambition must be made to check ambition. And that seems to be not working because how you become
powerful how you become somebody in the world of Congress now isn't through legislation and governance. It's by becoming a kind of pop culture political figure. And so the ambition just is oriented away from governance and more towards, you know, what my friend Jonah Goldberg calls the parliament of pundits. It's more towards punditry.
culture in Congress is eviscerating it, just annihilating it and disrupting the sort of Madisonian order. Because if you talked to the founders and you said, wait a minute, I can see some. parts of the 1787 constitution that really empower the president a lot. And the anti-federalists would point to some of these. The pardon power, you know, look at how powerful that is. His commander in chief authority, that's huge. What can we do about that?
And the Federalists would say, look, Congress is the check. It's Article one. It can impeach him. But if that is the prime check on the president and it becomes subordinate to the president, that is a. structural problem, and it's a structural problem created by our modern moment, our culture. A lot of folks made fun of, remember that former GOP congressman Madison Cawthorn? How can we forget?
How can we forget Madison Cawthorn? Well, a lot of folks made fun of him when he said, I'm hiring more comms people than policy people. And I thought when I saw that. He understood. He understood. He knew the assignment. He knew the assignment. And and that's. That is how you become somebody in Congress now is not through governance. It's through comms. It's by standing strong, whatever that means, even it has nothing to do with legislation. Can I, I want to build on what David said there.
When the Federalists, I don't like the Federalist, Anti-Federalist language because it's sort of like big propaganda coup for the Federalists. Like the Anti-Federalists didn't call themselves Anti-Federalists, you know? But for the sake of brevity, when the Federalists would respond to anti-Federalists about, say, the president's commander-in-chief power, they explicitly said, explicitly, Madison said this, Hamilton said this, this was the line.
It was the purse and the sword. The executive has the sword. Congress has the purse. And so because Congress has the purse, you don't got to worry too much about it because ultimately Congress can just like not requisition an army. They can just not do it. And that solves the problem. And so this is where, you know, to this question of like, are we living in a constitutional crisis? You can have a workable system. of separated institutions, shared powers, all that without impeachment.
Like, it's not great. It'd be better if there were some direct mechanism of executive accountability that worked. But impeachment barely worked anyway before Trump. It doesn't work now. But you can still muddle along. But if Congress is just going to say, hey, looks like our spending decisions are just advisory, are just sort of recommendations.
and you don't have to follow them, then effectively, there really is no executive check anymore. Effectively, the executive branch does have legislative power and is, you know... Montesquieu would have described it as despotism, a word I like because it sounds sinister. But that's what it is. No, no, no. David is going to tell us the courts are going to save us. Yes, David.
I'm not going to tell you the courts are going to save us because the courts cannot save us. Well, David, I'll quote you. You said the Supreme Court has rejected Trump and MAGA arguments again and again and again. Yes. So. But. Why won't they save us now? That's quite true. That is quite true. It is a fact that...
When he went to the Supreme Court, he was usually losing. And it is also true that during his first term, he complied with court rulings and yielded to the Supreme Court. Now, what's interesting, though, is he wasn't yielding at the very end. If we remember, if we remember at the very end, he was blowing through everything in his attempt to stay in power. So when I say that the courts can't save us, I'm not saying the courts don't have a.
indispensable role to play here. And we've already seen just an avalanche of injunctions being handed down. But as we can get into at the end of the day, that's going to depend. on voluntary compliance. from the executive branch. Which J.D. Vance has said we don't need, right? Which as we are already seeing in response to some of these district court rulings, rather the normal rhetoric in response to a district court ruling you don't like is that ruling is...
wrong. We're seeking an immediate appeal. There is a process here, right? But We're having some district court rulings. And then instead of that normal language of, oh, this is bad, this is wrong, we're going to appeal immediately, we're beginning to see they have no right to do this. They have no right to direct the executive branch. You have.
J.D. Vance tweeting, quote, if a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general and how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that's also illegal. Judges aren't allowed to control the executive.
legitimate power. And the weird thing is, even his examples are flawed. We've just been through, for example, a war on terror where the courts had lots to say about how the military conducted its operations, including for example, regarding military tribunals and things like that when we're talking about prosecuting terrorists. And when he says judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power, well, but who defines legitimacy of that power?
Judges defined the legitimacy of that power. This is sort of constitution. 101 sort of stuff. For example, I mean, no less a relevant person on the authority of the judiciary, Brett Kavanaugh, once said at a speech at Notre Dame. The critical aspect of Marbury versus Madison that is often overlooked is that, quote, the court not only has the power of judicial review of legislation, it also has the power to reject the president's interpretation of the Constitution.
That is fundamental to our separation of powers. That's fundamental to the whole concept of judicial review. And that... is where they're already threatening to go in response to district court judgments. So will they maintain that kind of resistance up through the courts of appeal in the Supreme Court?
remains to be seen. But that's why I say courts can't save us. I think courts will step up by and large as they are doing and do their duty, but the system still requires compliance. So it sounds like that's when we hit a... indisputable constitutional crisis if the president just refuses to abide by what the courts have ruled. You remember that old, the Homeland Security had that color-coded system, what was it, yellow, orange, red of the threat? So I would put yellow is...
defying a temporary district court order. Orange is you're defying either a final order of a district court or a court of appeals. Red is when they defy the Supreme Court. That's red flashing alarm. but it's going to be a graduated process. A couple of things.
Just I keep on saying I want to put a finer point on stuff David say, and I do. And that is part of what the administration is arguing, what the people like Vance are arguing, kind of the underlying premise, is that the U.S. has a system of like extremely strict...
separation of powers, right? Such that each branch can have no interference from the other branch. But that's like not really the case. It's not the case structurally, right? Like who confirms... presidential appointees the senate does the senate is exercising a kind of executive power when it's approving
the president's appointees to his cabinet, to other Senate confirmable agencies, right? Who structures the Supreme Court? The Constitution only says that there shall be a Supreme Court and gives us some guidance on what its original jurisdiction is, what its appellate is. jurisdiction might be but like the actual structuring
comes by way of Congress. Congress decides, you know, how many justices, what actually is the scope of the court's appellate jurisdiction, whether the court has clerks, whether it sits in a certain place, all these things about the court determined by Congress.
So this is Congress exercising some of the judicial power. And you see this throughout, like each branch, although... separated has its competency that doesn't mean that they are completely untouched by other branches and in fact when you think like theoretically about separation of powers which emerges as a doctrine
In the 18th century, around how one prevents absolutist government, separation of powers necessarily includes, has to include, some method of accountability for each branch. Branches cannot simply exist. untouched by other branches. And so the administration's claim, J.D. Vance's claim, that separation of powers means that district court judges can't alter or tie down
the president's legitimate authority, just, like, theoretically, it just doesn't work. Of course they can, or else it wouldn't actually be a system of separated powers, right? But I wanted to add a quick thing on the constitutional crisis point, and that is... I find myself not being thrilled about framing constitutional crisis as a discreet thing that happens once you trip a set of wires. I think it might be useful to think of constitutional crises as something akin to sicknesses or infections.
in a body, and an infection can be mild, it can be acute. An infection can leave you just feeling miserable. It can bring you to the point of death. And it progresses in stages. But whether it's late stage or early stage, it remains the case that you are ill. And I would say that the American consciousness system is ill and has been ill for some time.
And what we're in now is like the acute portion of that illness that wasn't foreordained. Like it didn't have to unfold this way, but because steps were not taken. to improve the health of the patient prior, now we're at a point where the patient is in critical condition. We need massive antibiotics. Right. So it looks like we have a diagnosis of that. constitutional illness that Jamel pointed out. When we come back, let's discuss the remedy.
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We take our reporting extra seriously because we know New York Times subscribers are counting on us. If you already subscribe, thank you. If you'd like to subscribe, go to nytimes.com slash subscribe. So let's continue with Jamel's point about what it is that ails the system right now. You know, if we don't necessarily want to live with a continued four year constitutional crisis every week.
What needs to happen now? What are the remedies? Jamel, you wrote that we cannot expect a return to the Constitution as it was, that whatever comes next will have to be a fundamental rethinking of the system. What kind of rethinking do you have in mind? I think that if there's like an original error, problem that was overlooked in the construction of the conscious system as it exists, it's that...
The American constitutional system was designed at a point where the modern political party, the mass political party, as we understand it, didn't exist. We take for granted these days that checks and balances don't really work as well as they should because if a president...
Party controls both Congress and the White House, it's like they're not going to want to restrain the president too much. But that like runs explicitly counter to what the framers thought they were doing. They figured people would be so jealous of their offices and their that comes from them, that they would restrain the encouragement from the executive and the judiciary, vice versa, because of the power of the office. But partisanship circumvents that and creates a link between
People across branches, such that I, as a legislator, have an interest in the president succeeding. I, even as a judge, you know, maybe share. the ideological perspective of the legislature, of the president, I have an interest in making sure everyone succeeds. It kind of short, it short circuits. checks and balances. So I don't have a blueprint here, but I think actually one of the major things that Americans need to think about is how do you structure a representative of government?
with political parties in mind, recognizing what they do, recognizing how they operate, recognizing how they make sort of like Madisonian-style checks and balances unstable.
David, does that line up with how you see things? Well, I think Jamel's diagnosis is dead on. I mean, we have checks and balances that were not designed for party primacy. It's not designed for a world in which Mike Johnson for example, could look at two career paths, one that says, I'm going to magnify the power and majesty of the office of Speaker of the House by asserting independent authority.
Or I'm going to say, sir, yes, sir, as loudly as I possibly can to Donald Trump. And that's my fork in the road. That's my branch. And Madison would have said, well, the obvious choice here is he's going to choose to magnify his own power and authority.
But Mike Johnson knows that if he doesn't say yes, sir, yes, sir to Trump, no matter the power and majesty he possesses right now in this moment as Speaker of the House, it's going to be over the instant he asserts his independence. He will be turned on by his own colleagues.
Like he's a, you know, like he's a wounded member of the pack. I think Jamel's diagnosis is absolutely true. And I think this is a. broadly held diagnosis for people who are thinking intentionally about the Constitution across a big part of the American political spectrum. Where we go from here is, as Jamel was talking about, a question mark. I mean, I have some discrete ideas about things that could be done, but.
We're at this moment where I do think we actually need constitutional reform. I think constitutional reform in some ways might be more urgent now than it's been in a very long time. And it's at the very moment where the. high bar that we have put over constitutional reform is probably higher than it's been in 100 years. And so at the very moment where we need reform, the barrier to that reform.
as a practical matter, is higher than it's been in a very long time. Well, I think this is what makes people disheartened. I mean, the rise of political parties. George Washington was warning about this. John Adams, Alexander Hamilton. This is not a new concern, but... especially these days when we have such a polarized kind of political party-driven system.
And the very people who we would rely on to do this are the ones who the system has been supporting. So you're basically asking people to risk their own power in order to kind of put the public good and... the constitutional health above that. And it's just, I'm not sure anybody thinks that is a possibility in the current situation, which I think is why people are like cynical and kind of tuned out. David, what would they be?
like setting aside the difficulty of doing it at this moment, setting aside the high bar, setting aside that maybe the last moment when you want to engage in serious constitutional reform is when the country is precisely so polarized, right? When you need it most is when you can. least trust the outcome. But putting all that aside, what sort of reforms do you have in mind?
I've got a few in mind and but I will as I tell you these reforms, I'm not saying this is my four point plan to solve America's constitutional issues, because the bottom line is. If the American people want a more despotic president, do unto others five times worse than they've done unto you becomes sort of our core political ethos. The things that I'm proposing are just fingers in the dike. So a few things.
One thing I would like to see is a constitutional amendment to make it easier to amend the Constitution. I love that. Not where it's just a majority vote and the Constitution's amended, but. Make it easier to amend the Constitution. Give people more of a sense that the structure of their government, if you achieve a reasonable consensus, is possible. So another thing that I would also say is expand the House.
expand the house by a lot. And that would have a couple of knock-on effects. Effect number one is it would really begin to dilute the power of the gerrymander. Because as it is right now, if you took a look at the state of Tennessee, With our number of congressional districts, you can gerrymander a congressional delegation to where a 60-40 state, it's 60% red, 40% blue.
becomes essentially 80-20 in its representation, which, again, has a polarizing, destabilizing effect. And then another one is take the pardon power out of the hands of the president. Don't remove pardon power entirely, but take it out of the sole hands of the president. I think we're just now beginning to see.
how influential that power can be to the very existence and health of the rule of law. I mean, this is something that Jamel and I might be the only people in the last decade who've quoted the same. And I'm sorry, Jamel, I just just for shorthand, I'm going to say anti-federalist. A guy named who calls himself an old wig. I love that. That was his pseudonym. So Publius was, you know, like a Federalist paper pseudonym. He called himself an old wig, W-H-I-G.
And he specifically centered around the pardon power in a prescient way as to its authority. And then another thing is we need to really sharpen the president's commander in chief power. The vagueness of it in the Constitution combined with the abdication of Congress to the president has meant that not only has the president exercised unilateral authority to essentially declare and prosecute wars over the last many decades.
that that vagueness of that authority may have critical domestic implications as... There's a legal argument being made that the influx of illegal immigrants is an invasion. And what is an invasion but an act of war? And what does that do? Unlock commander in chief powers. So those are just a few things. But if America is. so fused in this negative polarization, you can have reform after reform and we're still going to be dealing with that fact.
Can I just say real quick that last month I was at Williams College teaching a class on constitutional amendment and...
David's amendments, they're basically the ones that when students ask me how I thought we should amend the Constitution, like those are basically mine as well. I'd like throw in, you know, maybe... maybe writing into the Constitution explicitly that the president can be criminally liable for actions taken in office, like just to repudiate Trump v. U.S. I think that's like a good, solid, nonpartisan, right, kind of set of things to sort of like...
deal with the structure of the presidency in particular, given the events of like the last, I mean, the last 10 years, but certainly the last few decades. The thing I want to say, though, and this is... maybe a little counterintuitive, which is that I think we have a notion that kind of broad constitutional change can only come through a kind of... bipartisan, nonpartisan consensus. But when you look at the moments of...
constitutional or constitutional-ish change in the United States, those are partisan projects, right? Like Reconstruction was a partisan project. It was a project of the Republican Party and a particular faction within it. And I would like to suggest that when thinking about constitutional reform in the future, I don't think we should shy away from the notion that this may have to be a partisan project, that it has to be a...
project argued by a particular party in election cycle after an election cycle to build a kind of political majority to do it on a partisan basis. That, to me, seems like the only way you're going to get... to meaningful constitutional reform, sort of like lean into the fact that we are a partisan and polarized society. You know, what's interesting to me about this conversation is how much of it has focused on Congress.
as opposed to the efforts by President Trump. Just about every modern president, except maybe Jimmy Carter, has tried to expand. his authority, right? Like, I'm looking over here at Arthur Schlesinger's The Imperial Presidency, published in 1973. So there are some aspects of this that are normal in the sense that all presidents try to interpret the constitutional authority more and more expansively. Trump is sort of an extreme.
He's doing it in that kind of hydra approach that David mentioned. David, you also talked about the vagueness of the president's authority. In some ways, that's built in to the Constitution, right? Like Article One refers to the legislative powers. Herein granted shall be vested in a Congress. But Article 2 just refers to executive power without clearly defining its limits. So that's kind of like part of the eternal fight. The whole debate.
reminds me of this book called Constitutional Faith by Sanford Levinson. It was published in like the late 80s, but I only recently read it. And the idea is that we think about the Constitution as this sacred text in our... in our civic religion, right? And that image is supposed to suggest that the Constitution serves a unifying and integrating purpose, that it brings us together like a faith. But of course,
And this is the point the book makes, that if you look at the world's major religions, you see how their sacred texts are a source of enormous and constant dispute, a source of fragmentation as much as integration. So how we interpret the meaning of the sacred texts. Who gets to? interpret the meaning. Constitutions like our sacred religious texts can bring us together, but they can prompt our biggest fights. And I think that's part of what the Trump administration is doing in some cases.
fighting over interpretation, in some cases, ignoring the sacred texts altogether. But this feels like a moment of that kind of doctrinal dispute in our secular, civic... religion and i think that's one of the outcomes of of the trump era writ large that is forcing us to look at kind of basic bedrock principles even if our fixes can sometimes be be incremental you know i think we're in a period of
doctrinal dispute amongst what you might call the MAGA intellectuals, and doctrinal indifference slash disregard from Trump. So he doesn't care about doctrine at all. This whole conversation about constitutional structure for him, it's like, do you remember the sound of the teacher in the Peanuts cartoons? It's wah, wah, wah, wah. That's all this is to him. But I will say this for the people who actually have.
vision, like a Russ Vaughn, a J.D. Vance, others. Trump is the vessel through which they pour their vision. And a lot of people, this is one of the appeals of Trumpism has become, it's not just pure pro-Trump. It is also... now pro-Trump plus anyone anti-system, so long as they're willing to bend the knee to Trump. So that's how you get your Tulsi and your RFK Jr. pulled into this MAGA coalition.
And I think one of the keys about Trump is to realize the guy isn't unpredictable, actually. He's manipulable. And they have figured out how to pull some of these strings. Well, I think we can stop there for this first installment. of many constitutional crisis episodes. When we come back, we'll get hot and cold. Finally, it is time for a hot cold. Who's got the temperature today?
I have something that I'm hot on. That doesn't seem or sound right. People who see me on TikTok, that's actually the place where you would notice this, might know that I'm really into menswear. It's like a thing that I really enjoy. I was admiring your jacket. Oh, thank you. It's a Donegal Tweed field jacket. I've lately been really into just blue blazers, like old-fashioned traditional blue blazers with gold buttons.
I have a very Italian-styled one that has really wide lapels. It's a little longer. It's darted, so there's a bit of that shaping in the middle. Very Italian-European approach to the Blue Blazer. I recently bought... a very, very traditional American J-Press sack blazer. So, you know, no darting, three buttons, three and a half inch lapels, single vent in the back. Very old fashioned. And then I got for Christmas this past year.
a double-breasted blue blazer that I actually kind of wear a lot. I think it's great. It's very nautical and I really enjoy it. Just like the blue blazer. It's like such a versatile... What sent you down the blue blazer rabbit hole? I don't... First of all, I needed one like last year. I was like, I gotta get...
I don't really have one. I need just like an old fashioned blue blazer. And then I bought one and then I was like, you know what? I just kind of got really into particular details and like ways of doing it. It's like, it's such a standard and again, traditional. piece of menswear that I'm actually just sort of interested in all the little ways it can be different from style to style, from maker to maker. You know, Carlos does this with his fleeces, right? Yeah.
That's the level of thought I put into like my Memphis Grizzlies gear when I go to a game. But I will say this for Jamel. Jamel doesn't want to toot his own horn, but unless I'm wrong, Jamel. Didn't the menswear guy online explicitly shout you out as like the only political pundit in America who knows how to dress? I seem to recall that. Yes, that is true. Yeah. Yes. So he knows of what he speaks. Yes.
Huge, huge honor. Huge honor from the menswear guy. Well, we're going to start having you send Carlos and Ross memos before each show so that they can, like, you know. Glow up. Wow. You know what? I think we should have done the whole show on menswear rather than constitutional crises. But I have a crisis in my wardrobe. So maybe maybe it all comes together. David Jamel. Thank you so much for joining us this week. Really appreciate it. Please come back. Thanks for having us. Yep. Our pleasure.
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at nytimes.com. This episode was produced by Elisa Gutierrez, Sofia Alvarez-Boyd, and Andrea Batanzos. It's edited by Jordana Hoogman. Our fact check team is Kate Sinclair. Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Etheem Shapiro, Carol Saburo, Amin Zahota, and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie Rose Stresser.