Hello,

That's kind of conversation to your soul.

That's conversation to your soul.

I'm the Bessner, here as always with my friend and comrade Derek Davison, and we're very excited to welcome back to the podcast today. One of our favorite guests, a person I've known, I mean, Aziz must be a decade now, which is nuts.

Aziz Rana, Aziz is the J. Donald Monon, S.J., University Professor of Law and Government

at Boston College, the law school there. And he's also the author, and this is why we've invited

him to talk of a really excellent essay. Everyone check it out, Lincoln Show Notes, titled

Constitutional Collapse for Side sidecar which is part of

the new left review um aziz again thank you so much for joining us thanks so much for the the kind

introduction and it's just great to be here um well let's start at the beginning uh what is going on? What is the Trump administration's understanding of the Constitution? What do you think is different from the first term? And then we can maybe get into some of the details. But I think it might be useful to start as your piece does with sort of like a 40,000-foot view of what's happening here.

Sure. So I think the most common way right now of talking about the constitutional moment

is to present Trump's defiance, so issuing of all of these different executive orders,

Musk's actions, as producing something

like a constitutional crisis or a constitutional stress test.

And the focus there is the idea that this is a product of the Trump administration basically

refusing perhaps to obey court order.

So defying the courts. And that's what produces the crisis.

And the argument that I wanted to make in the piece is that that really substantially undersells what's going on and that it's better to actually think of this moment as one in which a very small

kind of band of far right figures. so Trump, Musk, and loyalists around

him, are effectively attempting to collapse what had been the mid-20th century American constitutional

compact. And one of the ways that we can actually see this is even in the terms of the executive orders,

which is if you just look at these executive orders on their face, so for instance, things like

...