Yes, We’re In A Constitutional Crisis — And It’s Democrats’ Fault

Democrats claim we’re in a constitutional crisis because President Trump believes — and acts on the belief — that the executive should control the executive branch. It is a crisis their party has forced on Americans for the last 125 years.

It was the Democrat Party of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson who designed an administrative state to be unaccountable to voters and to ultimately swallow the original Constitution. Constitutional scholars have described this situation as the United States functioning under “two constitutions” — the original, and a competing system of government under Progressives’ “living constitution.” We’re about to see which one will win this very long march through American law and culture.

In the recent election, Americans declared their allegiance to the original U.S. Constitution by electing, by historic margins, a man who promised to uphold it. But simply declaring allegiance does not erase the illegitimate “constitution” that runs Washington, D.C. We are in the early stages of a new front in this longstanding American cold civil war.

The American founders would have called it slavery to force Americans to work to pay for a massive, debt-ridden, counterproductive, and unconstitutional administrative state that majorities of Americans kept voting to restrain by electing Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and now Donald Trump. Throughout the last century, even when Americans voted to limit the bureaucracy, they somehow kept getting more bureaucracy.

As Christopher Caldwell pointed out in Age of Entitlement, Reagan’s presidency was a prime example of this dynamic. He promised to cut government while it expanded. Voters elected him to do this key thing, and they got the opposite of what they voted for.

Because this cancer has advanced so far, Trump may be the last president who can wrestle down the administrative state instead of merely acting as its puppet. He’s certainly giving it the WWE treatment.

Yet it’s impossible for the real Constitution to win if anti-Constitution judges and courts can tell the president he cannot govern his own employees and agencies. It’s impossible for the real Constitution to win if the American people are forced to fund the Constitution’s enemies. “Progressives” demand a fight with both arms tied behind the Constitution’s back.

Democrats want to subjugate Americans to unelected bureaucrats and unelected judges, not protect self-government. They want a slave empire, not a representative republic.

They want Americans to be bound, just as they insist the alleged representatives we allegedly elect to be, entirely by unconstitutional rules. If we object or complain, they want unelected courts to enforce Democrats’ unconstitutional regulations, then saddle us with bankrupting legal fees as extra punishment for seeking the way of life that is our birthright. For, as Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn notes, “The U.S. Constitution implies an entire system of manners and behaviors, an entire outlook upon the world.”

Americans have been propagandized against our constitutional birthrights for longer than the lives of every American living today. We cannot be free if our minds are not free, if we cannot think in the ways of our fathers and prudently apply those unchanging truths about human nature to today’s conditions.

Like every tyranny, Progressivism requires mass propaganda. As we’ve seen with just a peek into U.S. Agency for International Development funding, Democrats’ propaganda machine relies not only on state-controlled media but also on a garbage public education system. Both work to erase not just the average American’s understanding of his constitutional rights and duties, but also our public officials’ understanding of their constitutional rights and duties.

Just as most Americans have, elected officials must stop granting legitimacy to these propaganda institutions and their constantly false projections. Next — and swiftly — they must rediscover the constitutional principles and actions many never learned previously because they were deliberately deprived of such knowledge and habits.

The American people need more than just the elected executive to be engaged in this fight. We need Congress to wake up and fight for their constitutional prerogatives and the traditional American way of life like this is the last chance they might ever get to do so. Because it might be. It’s positive to see weak senators like Todd Young, Susan Collins, and Bill Cassidy show a willingness to vote for their own party’s nominees, but truly rising to the occasion requires much more than delaying one’s nap schedule for five minutes.

Just as the Constitution demands that the executive truly control the executive branch he is elected to lead, the Constitution demands that Congress legislate. Congress needs to stop forcing Americans to live under de facto laws created by unelected bureaucrats in the judiciary and administrative state. It needs to show it understands that Congress and the president together have made the executive agencies, federal judiciary, and all except the Supreme Court serve at its pleasure.

This is why fights about spending and programs are not merely about spending and programs. They are about whether the United States will still adhere in any way at all to its real Constitution.

They are about whether our elections are real or fake. They are about whether we still in some way rule ourselves, or if we are merely serfs ruled by a Politburo. They are about whether government of the people, by the people, and for the people has perished at last from the earth.

We need more leaders who will fight like hell to forestall that end. Trump can stand out front, but he can’t do it all alone. Any member of Congress who is willing to let the next Democrat president reverse Trump’s executive orders because Congress didn’t make them law should resign, and quickly.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist. Her latest book with Regnery is “False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America.” A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.