MSNBC legal analyst Danny Cevallos refuted claims that President Donald Trump’s executive actions amount to a “constitutional crisis.”
Several liberal legal scholars argued in The New York Times on Monday that Trump’s efforts to reform the federal government have caused a “constitutional crisis,” with one characterizing the president’s actions as “lawless.” After “Morning Joe” host Mika Brzezinski read from the NYT article and asked for his take, Cevallos urged caution when uttering “constitutional crisis,” asserting that executive orders alone cannot meet that threshold.
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“I think we need to be careful with the term constitutional crisis because, as I define it, that would be a situation where the Constitution doesn’t have an answer and there is a pressing conflict. The flurry of executive orders, the chaos, that I think doesn’t get us to crisis yet. It is irritating for the courts,” Cevallos told Brzezinski. “It is challenging. It could lead to a serious problem if, as you said, they become too congested with dealing with these orders. The crisis occurs, and we’ve already talked about it, at the moment when there is a court order and the president or the administration refuses to follow it, because historically, we don’t really have a clear answer for what to do in that situation.”
“On the first half of it, issuing a bunch of executive orders, not only do we know that the courts can handle it, they already did this back in 2017. This is the same MO. The Trump administration then would just fire out executive orders. It felt like they weren’t even spell-checking them,” he continued. “And then they would let the courts prune them like the proverbial bonsai tree, or they would just withdraw them and go back to the drawing board. It’s probably not the most efficient way of doing it. It’s chaotic, as you said. It’s problematic.”
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Several Democratic lawmakers have accused Trump and Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) chair Elon Musk of pushing the country into a “constitutional crisis” with their efforts to cut wasteful spending and shrink the size of the federal government.
The Trump administration is appealing injunctions imposed by federal judges including those pertaining to DOGE, Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order terminating birthright citizenship and the president’s order freezing foreign aid, among others following litigation by Democrats and unions representing government employees.
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.