America Isn't Having a Constitutional Crisis

When news broke that Donald Trump had fired James Comey, who was in the midst of investigating possible collusion between the Russian government and the president’s campaign, Brian Schatz knew just what to call it. “We are in a full-fledged constitutional crisis,” the Democratic senator wrote on Twitter. A host of Democratic lawmakers have since echoed Schatz’s dire warning.

Are they right? And how would Americans know if they were living through a constitutional crisis? In a defining the term, the legal scholars Sanford Levinson and Jack Balkin noted that Americans have long overused the phrase, which isn’t surprising in a country tested to its core by a failed constitution (the Articles of Confederation), civil war, economic depression, and two world wars. In recent years, “constitutional crises” have been spotted in everything from the to the . (For the record, Levinson and Balkin consider the 2000 election a “constitutional showdown” and sparked chatter about a looming constitutional crisis.