A Washington Post article header has drawn outrage on Bluesky. Here it is:
How Trump is blasting through norms and testing limits of his power
Experts say President Donald Trump’s actions have pushed the country into fraught territory. They are divided on whether he has breached constitutional guardrails.
That implies that a significant number of experts think Trump hasn’t “breached constitutional guardrails.” Who are these experts? The one person they cite is Steven Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern University and co-chair of the Federalist Society. The article says:
He praised Trump’s embrace of a concept called the “unitary executive theory,” which posits that the president has supreme power over the executive branch, including the ability to remove officials.
In particular, Calabresi said, he was pleased with Trump’s moves to dismiss members of the Federal Trade Commission and the National Labor Relations Board.
However, that’s at most a claim that the president can do anything he wants within the executive branch. That says nothing about ICE detentions, threats to withhold funds on ideological grounds, or attempts to intimidate lawyers and judges. Nowhere in the article is Calabresi cited as saying Trump hasn’t seriously violated the Constitution.
Further down, the article says, “Legal scholars were split on how to characterize this fraught moment.” But none of the quotes that follow argue that Trump’s actions are legitimate. The disagreement is on whether to call it a constitutional crisis, a crisis of democracy, or a crisis of the republic. The central noun in all those phrases is “crisis.”
I’m reminded of the techniques creationists use to create the impression that “experts” are divided on the reality of evolution. One technique is to find someone who has a degree in something and cite that person’s views, whether or not they come from expertise in evolutionary biology. A degree in Biblical studies will do just fine. Another is to take a disagreement on how evolution works and make it look like a disagreement about evolution as such. That’s similar to the Post’s technique of treating disagreement on what to call the crisis as disagreement on the constitutionality of Trump’s actions.
This is cowardice on the Post’s part, a lack of willingness to say that there’s no case for the constitutionality of his most egregious actions and constitutional lawyers know it.