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Notes -
The best answer I have seen, and it isn't a great one, is this law review article by (left-wing lawprofs) Jack Balkin and Sandy Levinson (henceforth B/L)
They identify three types of constitutional crisis:
The traditional paradigmatic examples (not cited by B/L) are:
B/L are good on what is not a constitutional crisis - for example anything which can be resolved by SCOTUS is a normal dispute, not a crisis; impeachment is an extraordinary but regular remedy for Presidential misbehaviour, not a crisis; the controversial use of emergency powers in a real emergency is a crisis, but not a constitutional one.
B/L are less good on what is a constitutional crisis - partly because the US Constitution mostly works so true constitutional crises by their definition are rare. (Also it will never be clear whether something is a type 2 crisis or not because it isn't clear what action is actually necessary). They say there has only been one clear-cut type 1 crisis in America since independence - and it was right at the beginning, with the Constitutional Convention going rogue and the Constitution being adopted in violation of the amendment procedure set out in the Articles of Confederation. They identify two cases of type 2 crises that they think are clear-cut:
The biggest flaw in the paper is that B/L don't think about game theory. There are a number of cases where actor A threatens to violate the constitution (triggering a type 1 crisis) or to use dubiously constitutional hardball tactics (triggering a type 3 crisis) and actor B acquiesces. B/L consider this to be a dispute resolved within the constitutional framework, but it isn't. They give numerous examples of Roosevelt getting his way with this type of threat, both during the New Deal and during WW2.
The other obvious gap (which B/L acknowledge) is that their framework doesn't really work in an environment of pervasive government secrecy. If the President violates the constitution but doesn't get caught, is it really a constitutional crisis?
It also overlooks constitutional crisis in the sense where the tension between the constitution-as-written and the constitution-as-applied is too great, and when the illusion finally drops, it's a disaster.
The trivial example is 'what happens if the President just says nope to the courts, end stop'. We know what happens, here! There's literally a hundred and fifty year-old overt example where the President just told the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to shut the fuck up, but there's more recent versions, too, from the bottom to the top. The only 'real' meaning the judicial system, even assuming everything is working by the book, is to let criminals go free and make bad publicity for the executive branch; anything less than two thirds of the Senate means bupkis. So the worst that a President explicitly ordering the executive branch to just completely and clearly ignore a court order (or SCOTUS to order something that's physically impossible) is let everyone know what's already been the rules.
Uh, what do you think happens once everybody knows that? Every outrageous Fourth Amendment example, every popular law overturned or unpopular law upheld, every civil tort that came across as dumb, what happens when a large voting block forms that demands, rather than changing the law or the judges, just doing it anyway?
But wait, it gets worse! There's a lot of that tension that people just haven't sat down and thought about, hard. Some of it pretty stupid. We just haven't explored it yet because there was no cause. What happens if the entire Congressionally authorized budget for the judicial branch (including security) gets spent on a bulk order for paper, day one?
I wrote up a big post on this when someone here asked how we'd go from modern disagreements to a civil war, and I'm absolutely not publishing it publicly, and there's a dozens of things significantly worse than that. Maybe some of them have resolutions I'm not aware of. And even the ones without resolutions aren't necessarily going to escalate on their own: Nothing Every Happens is a bet that wins 99% of the time.
That's not an optimistic thought if you can do statistics.
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