Failed Constitution Check: The Professoriat Weighs In

I think that I first used the word “coup” here to describe our current situation on January 31st of 2025, when the DOGE-lings deployed illegally across the federal bureaucracy to start the wrecking, but I first said that the Constitution was a failure here on December 23rd of 2019 (in the third post to this blog).

I’ve been bangin’ that drum for a while.

Though I do think that it’s been pretty obvious that the Constitution’s check and balances were failing at least as early as Bush v. Gore in 2000, but it’s been reasonable to say that they have definitively failed since Trump was re-elected after having attempted a coup in 2021 and then not having been removed from office or prosecuted.

But I’m just an interested citizen, not a professional at this stuff.

But now the professors are saying it too.

On October 3rd Dan Nexon, Professor of Government and Foreign Service at Georgetown University, posted The State of the Republic is Grim to Lawyers, Guns & Money. In it, he says:

The Republic as we knew it is over. The fight now is whether the new one will be a fascistic, competitive authoritarian regime or a pluralist democracy that, we can hope, is better than what came before.

The next day Steven Taylor, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, posted Has the Constitution Failed? in response on Outside the Beltway. His subtitle (“The reality is, I can’t say no.”) sums it up, but he also goes on to speculate about possible directions the country could go from there.

Then on Sunday Paul Campos, Professor of Law focusing on Constitutional law at University of Colorado Boulder, posted Notes for next time on Lawyers, Guns & Money. He agrees with the premise that the Constitution has failed, and adds:

I’m casting a third vote for “return to the pre-Trump political status quo is impossible, and in any case probably not even desirable at this point.”

So that’s the professionals now too.

You should definitely read all three of the posts; they’re important.

As Campos says:

Where to go from here is a question that has no obvious answer, but the first step — a step which in my view the Democratic party will, for fundamental institutional and psychological reasons, remain fundamentally incapable of ever taking — is to recognize where “here” actually is.

And that is definitely correct.

The Constitution has failed.

That is not happening now, it has already happened.

This is not the country it was before January; it is fundamentally different now.

But what exactly it is, or more importantly what it will become, is not yet decided.

And what that is will not be decided by Presidents or Governors; it will be decided by the citizens, choosing which values they’re each willing to let slide and which they’ll actually fight for.