From The Editor’s Desk: Contending With Civic Chaos

We are now halfway through the fourth week of the second Trump presidency. It hasn’t even been a full month, and if the experience thus far had to be reduced to a single word, the most apt choice might be confusion. 

To start his term, the president and his goons have unleashed a flurry of executive orders, running the gambit of seeming illegality — from attacks on birthright citizenship to the sudden shutdown of entire government agencies. 

Much of the administration’s efforts have been caught up in federal court, as judges have ruled they exceed the powers granted to the executive branch. 

In response to rulings which stalled the administration’s agenda, Vice President JD Vance raised more than a few eyebrows in a Feb. 9 post on X, which laid out a questionable interpretation of separation of powers. 

“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” Vance wrote. “If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

Vance’s words raised alarm amongst liberals and the media that the administration could be gearing up to ignore judicial rulings, inciting a potential constitutional crisis. In this moment, it appears as though some of the most basic, foundational concepts in American civics are coming under serious question.

The power of judicial review, which was established in the 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision and gives the judiciary the power to strike down laws ruled to be unconstitutional, is a legal precedent nearly as old as the republic itself. 

It’s notions like these — that congress has the power of the purse, that the president executes the laws, that the judicial branch serves as a check on the powers of the other two — that I copied onto flash cards and memorized for my high school civics class. 

After graduation I set them aside, carrying on with my life thinking these fundamental precepts of American government were as set in stone as the Ten Commandments. But today it’s hard to be so sure. 

I don’t know if the Trump administration will actually follow through on the threats to subvert democratic procedure emanating from some of its members. At that, I couldn’t tell you what it would look like if they did. But I do know that our civic space feels a lot less certain than it did a few weeks ago.

Trump has spent a decade ripping apart political norms, but this feels different. If judicial review isn’t a thing, and if congress doesn’t have the power of the purse, then is any rule or procedure we bind ourselves to actually real? Are the laws we abide by legitimate? 

It’s something that, if you think about it for long enough, can really drive you down a path of questioning everything previously thought to be undeniably true — at least it has for me. 

We’ve been in spots like this before — our system has been challenged and has come out on top. At the end of the day though, our government, one of laws, not of men, requires faithful stewards to make sure it stays as such. 

The historical event our current moment echos the most is when in 1832 the Supreme Court ruled that laws forcing Indigenous Americans from their land were unconstitutional. In response, President Andrew Jackson ignored the ruling and continued with his removal policies, supposedly uttering the now infamous quote, “Justice Marshall has rendered his decision, now lets see him enforce it.” 

The system survived this crisis just as it has others. Here’s to hoping our government of laws has another 250 years left in it — but I’d be lying if I said the current situation didn’t feel especially sticky.