Is America Really in a Constitutional Crisis? - The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator | USA News and Politics

Dean Obeidallah: I apologize for having been AWOL for a while, but I've been busy doing good work in other venues.

He says most of the powers that Donald Trump is trying to take back were once lost in the 1940s and 1970s in counterreactions by Congress and the courts to perceived abuses by FDR and Nixon .

The root of the problem is that the Supreme Court keeps approving expansions of federal government power, he says.

The big bruhaha over Trump ’s dismissal of federal workers only impresses those who don’t know their history.

One of the principal ways that the framers sought to control power was by building in a continuing power struggle between competing power centers into the structure of our government.

Maybe the downsizing of the federal government could have been done more tactfully. Maybe DOGE would be less controversial if Trump and Musk had done more early on.

E. Donald Elliott : The damage is already done in the minds of the people who hear over and over that Trump is defying the courts, as my favorite and best co-author, Gail Charnley Elliott , and I explain in this article in TAS , “ What’s Worse Than Fake News ?” Even where the courts maintain that Trump ’s positions are wrong, Trump 's legal positions are not frivolous, but instead have a reasonable basis in existing law.