Free Republic

State governments, community groups, advocacy nonprofits and regular Americans have filed a large and growing number of federal lawsuits opposing President Donald Trump’s barrage of executive orders and policy statements. Some of his actions have been put on hold by the federal courts, at least temporarily. As a scholar of the federal courts, however, I expect the courts will be of limited help in navigating through this complicated new political landscape. One problem is that the U.S. Supreme Court in recent years has moved sharply to the right and has approved of past efforts to expand the powers of the...

The New York Times published a think piece last week strategizing how leftists might be able to thwart the will of American voters and rescue democracy from President Donald Trump should he win on Nov. 5. Using the term "democracy" euphemistically for a state of things in which Democrats or leftists of other stripes are in power, the authors — a pair of Harvard University professors hostile to Trump, the Constitution as written, and the Electoral College — recommended "societal mobilization" should the powers that be fail to get their way. Daniel Ziblatt and Steve Levitsky's call to action, which...

Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt advised pushing a "militant democracy" to ensure an "authoritarian figure" like former President Trump never rises to power again. In an op-ed for the New York Times, Levitsky and Ziblatt describe how they spent the last year "researching how democracies can protect themselves from authoritarian threats from within," lamenting how close Trump remains to getting a second term. "How could such an openly authoritarian figure have a coin flip’s chance of returning to the presidency? Why have so many of our democracy’s defenses seemingly broken down, and which, if any, remain?" they wrote....