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A Constitutional Crisis: Can the Rule of Law Survive This Presidency?

John W. Whitehead
8 min readFeb 12, 2025

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“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest — forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

This has all the makings of a constitutional crisis.

According to law professor Amanda Frost, “a constitutional crisis occurs when one branch of government, usually the executive, ‘blatantly, flagrantly and regularly exceeds its constitutional authority — and the other branches are either unable or unwilling to stop it.’”

Consider for yourself.

The president has gone rogue, doubling down on his belief that “I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

The vice president believes the president should be a law unto himself, i.e., unaccountable to the other branches of the government.

The Republican-controlled Congress appears to be deaf, dumb and blind to the Executive Branch’s blatantly unconstitutional overreaches.

The courts, which have in recent years largely rubberstamped the government’s power grabs, are ill-prepared to rein in a sitting president who is…

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John W. Whitehead
John W. Whitehead

Written by John W. Whitehead

Constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute, is one of the nation’s leading advocates of civil liberties and human rights.

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