Rules for a constitutional crisis - Lessig

Found here. My comments in bold.

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I believe that Trump is behaving as badly as any President ever—certainly worse than Nixon, and maybe even worse than Johnson (Andrew, not Lyndon). He has no understanding of his place in the constitutional order. (An odd claim. Let's see if the author cites any references. 

Especially odd since Obama bragged about his use of executive power, saying he had a "pen and a phone." Unfortunately for the Left, they themselves are responsible for the current situation, since they love government power. It is they who have expanded the scope and influence of government. It is they who love dictates, court orders, and executive orders.

Apparently they never considered the idea that such powers might end up in the hands of those they oppose. This arrogance, that they would always have that power and thus would always be able to advance their agenda, is exactly why the Right has always warned us about big government. Well, the Left has made their bed, and now they don't like the mattress so much any more.

And since when has the Left valued the constitutional order?)

His White House has run amuck, issuing diktats without advice from either the State Department or the Department of Justice. (Evidence? Sources?)

He has no discipline. He has no understanding. And he feels himself constrained by nothing—save the pathologically thin skin that controls him as meth controls an addict. He is constitutionally compromised, and unqualified to be President. (The author makes accusation after accusation without so much as a link or a quote. We therefore shall summarily dismiss them.)

And had the Electoral College done its job, we wouldn’t be here now. (Whaa? The Electoral College did exactly what it was supposed to do. Perhaps the author meant to appeal to the popular vote results?)

But we are here now. And what here now needs is other members of government behaving as they ought to behave. Of course, the public should protest as it has: Huge, peaceful protests (Another howler. Peaceful? What planet does the author live on?)

insisting on the values that Donald Trump is denying. (What values are those, sir?)

But Members of Congress need to behave like Members of Congress. They need to understand their role, and keep within it.

That role of course includes rallying the public to the values we all should share. (What are those values? And why should we share them? Does the author intend to impose his values on others?)

But it does not include dressing-down border control agents, or staff working at airports. (Again, references?)

It is outrageous that border control has not obeyed court orders to permit detained immigrants access to lawyers. And I can’t begin to imagine the suffering of those immigrants, detained as they are.

But the ordinary process for dealing with that is for courts to hold those officers in contempt. There is no doubt that the lawyers who obtained the court orders will ask for that remedy. There is no doubt that at least a few of the courts will demand border patrol justify itself. The ordinary process will work. For once a court fines or jails one recalcitrant officer, the rest will quickly fall into line. In this process, there is no constitutional role for members of Congress as marshals of the courts. Their job is in Congress.

And there is plenty for them to do right now. If Trump refuses to abide by the Constitution and laws (including the Foreign Bribery Clause), (This is specious, as I explain here.)

he should be impeached. Obviously. That is the role of Congress. Members can begin that debate right now, they can demand hearings to address the issues. The Democrats could even hire their own careful and practiced litigator — another Richard Cates — to begin to put together the evidence they would need to proceed. That’s their job. They should do that job seriously and well.

Because if America is to avoid slipping into civil war, (Is he warning us about the danger, or threatening us? This speaks to my earlier comment, in that the Left is interested in power at any cost. If they can't get it via democracy, they'll get it with court decisions, If the court doesn't go their way, they appeal to executive action. If that doesn't happen, they turn to protest. If that fails, violence is the next step. In any case, the objective is power. That is why these people should never be allowed to be in positions of power.)

the people we need to keep in focus are the people who elected Donald Trump. I get that the easy way to think and talk about those Americans is to call them racists, or sexists or idiots. No doubt there are some who are those (as there are some on the other side who are each of those things too). But it is neither true nor helpful to simplify this story into good versus evil. The citizens who elected Trump are not evil. And if America is going to survive this crisis, we need to convince them first that their President should not be President. (Wow, something I finally agree with.)

We need to show them that their own values are consistent with ours, in this respect at least. (Values that are still unnamed.)

That won’t happen with hysterics. It won’t happen with violence. (Ok, so he's opposed to violence, which is a tacit concession that there is violence out there. But remember he claimed the protests were violence-free?)

It won’t happen by behaving just as badly as Donald Trump is behaving. It will only happen if the opposition is, and seems, better than Trump. That is, if it inspires in all Americans—and especially a large swath of the supporters of Trump—a recognition of the ideals that we all know we are to embrace: the Constitution, the rule of law, and government officials who know their place within that system. (Finally, he tells us what we should value. Well, it is the Constitution that gives us the Electoral College, which the author claimed didn't do its job. And we have already noted that the Left doesn't value the law, at least when the law doesn't go their way.)

We should learn from the Tea Party, yet be better than the Tea Party. The millions who are doing their duty as citizens to protest the violation of America’s values (There is no such thing as "America's values." America isn't a person or a consciousness, it is a political and geographical entity. There is a wide diversity of values, many of which are in conflict with each other. The author appeals to a fiction.)

need to show up at every congressman’s office, and ask, what are you doing? This President is being enabled by the most pathetic weakness of a Republic — and precisely the weakness George Washington warned against—party over country. (The Left's devotion to its agenda is legendary. And the results have been devastating, enabling the very thing that happened: Donald Trump.)

The fight that citizens must wage now is against that pathology with Congress first. The fight that Congress must wage now is with this out of control executive first. And the fight that the courts will wage, easily and effectively, now is with officers who don’t obey their orders.

These fights are distinct, critical, and essential. But if we’re (Who is this "we?")

to win, we cannot seem the crazy ones here. (That train has left the station.)

Our work now has got to be to unite Americans as Americans. We must remind the partisans that they are citizens first. And that as citizens, we must rally an allegiance to the Constitution that this President seems so keen to ignore. (Another unsupported assertion.)