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Notes -
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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