Impending Trump Constitutional Crisis

 

This article was originally published on Daily Kos.

By Alan Singer

During his campaign for the Presidency, Donald Trump promised to be a dictator on day one and to exercise extraordinary presidential power to achieve his agenda, including use the military as a domestic police force to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, rollbacking corporate and environmental regulations, and using the Justice Department to root out and prosecute American citizens he considers domestic enemies. His proposed cabinet members and advisors, a team of Trump loyalists with questionable qualifications, and his demand that the Senate blanketly approve them without critical hearings shows that his threats were not just hyperbole. With the election of Donald Trump, the United States now faces its worst constitutional crises since the American Civil War in the 1860s. This is how I worry it may unfold unless Congressional Republicans and the federal courts, especially the Supreme Court, act to stop it.

The United States Constitution describes the office of the President in Article II and the power of the President is left vague. In Section 1 of Article II, the Constitution states “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America,” but executive Power is never defined so we do not know exactly what the authors actually saw as the job of the President.

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Alan Singer is a historian and teacher educator at Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York. His most recent books are Social Studies for Secondary Schools, 5th edition (Routledge, 2024) and Class-Conscious Coal Miners (SUNY Press, 2024). Blogs, tweets, essays, interviews, and e-blasts present his views and not those of Hofstra University.

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