Part I of V
James Madison did not design the American government to run on virtue. That’s a good thing, as we witness the norm-breaking and narcissistic president we have elected. Madison designed the Constitutional government to run despite the absence of it, based on social contracts modeled on Native American communities. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” he wrote in Federalist 51, because he assumed the people who would eventually hold power would be no more trustworthy than the people who held it in 1787. The genius of the design was never that any one branch would behave well. It was that each branch would have both the incentive and the tool to stop the others from behaving badly. That system is now being tested from fifteen directions at once — outlined below — and the facts of 2026 suggest it is holding in places, buckling in others, and in at least one instance being rewritten by the very Court meant to defend it. What follows walks through each threat to the United States Constitution in turn, then steps back to ask what the pattern across all fifteen adds up to.
*A short note here -- I was looking for an overview of the current “Constitutional Crisis” and couldn’t find one. So I started this project to provide it for myself and to share with you. A longer note about the research methodology follows the essay in Part V.
1. Power of the purse
The oldest and most literal check Congress holds over the executive is the power of the purse. The Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the authority to decide how public money is spent. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 exists because a previous president tested that boundary and Congress closed the gap. In 2026, that gap has reopened: a “pocket rescission” withheld nearly five billion dollars in foreign aid regardless of what Congress decided, and courts found the administration violated funding orders in case after case. A federal appeals court restored some of that money. The check worked, but only because someone sued, and only after the money had already been frozen for months.
In late August, the dispute escalated from violating the Impoundment Control Act to disputing that the law binds the executive at all. OMB Director Russell Vought announced the administration will withhold funding under the Act until it expires on its own terms regardless of what Congress does, and OMB quietly rewrote its government-wide guidance on budget execution to claim a unilateral right to rescind and delay appropriated funds for policy reasons. Vought has separately called the Impoundment Control Act itself unconstitutional — not a specific application of it, but the 1974 statute in its entirety, the same law this section opened by describing as the reason this gap had been closed once already.
2. Emergency powers and independent agencies
For ninety years, Humphrey’s Executor let Congress insulate certain agency heads — the FTC, the EEOC, others — from being fired simply because a president disliked their politics. That doctrine is gone now, overturned this year by a Supreme Court that also, in the same term, permitted sweeping tariffs to be imposed under an emergency-powers statute never intended for ordinary trade policy, before eventually striking those tariffs down. The tariff ruling shows the system correcting itself. The Humphrey’s Executor ruling shows the system’s own referee redrawing the field, permanently, in the executive’s favor.
The Federal Reserve fight illustrates how incomplete even a win can be. When the Supreme Court declined to let Trump remove Governor Lisa Cook in June, the 5-4 ruling turned entirely on procedure — Trump had denied her notice and a chance to respond to the allegations against her, not on whether a president can fire a Fed governor “for cause” at all. That underlying question was sent back to the lower courts, where it remains unresolved; Cook keeps her seat for now because of a process failure, not because the Court settled the substance. And the emergency-powers pattern from the tariff fight has already repeated: on August 26, Trump declared a national emergency over the security of the “bulk-power system,” a declaration whose practical effect is to let the federal government block or condition purchases of foreign-made grid equipment — a cybersecurity-adjacent trade and infrastructure policy running through the same emergency-declaration authority as the tariffs, rather than through ordinary legislation.
3. Elections and redistricting
More than a quarter of all U.S. House seats have been redrawn mid-decade, outside the normal once-a-decade process, in a tit-for-tat between Texas and California that neither side started in good faith and both now defend as necessary retaliation. Layered on top of that, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais gutted the primary legal tool that had constrained racially discriminatory redistricting for sixty years, just months before those new maps take effect in a midterm election. And the two Democratic commissioners of the body meant to administer federal elections on a bipartisan basis were removed four months before voters go to the polls.
A quieter threat surfaced closer to Election Day itself. Trump allies floated the idea of stationing immigration agents at or near polling places — Steve Bannon called ICE’s airport deployments “perfect training for the fall of 2026,” and Senator Markwayne Mullin, during his confirmation hearing to lead DHS, said ICE could be sent to polls in response to a “specific threat.” Even the perceived presence of federal agents at a polling site can constitute illegal voter intimidation, particularly in immigrant and mixed-status communities. DHS backed off publicly — an agency official told state election officials there would be no ICE presence at 2026 polling places, and ICE’s own acting chief admitted agents would have “no reason” to be there — but the walk-back came only after nine state attorneys general formally demanded clarification and at least seven states passed or introduced legislation explicitly barring immigration enforcement from polling sites.
That same official, Mullin, resurfaced the threat in a different form in July 2026, now installed as DHS Secretary. He warned the top election official in all fifty states and D.C. that they could face fines, the loss of federal grants, and potentially criminal prosecution — up to and including prison time — if they refused to run their voter rolls through a DHS database to screen for noncitizens, after DHS preliminarily flagged more than 250,000 supposed noncitizens on rolls in California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. A federal judge blocked the database’s use within days, ruling it violated rules governing the disclosure of Social Security records — the same pattern, seen throughout this essay, of a court checking an overreach after the fact. But a court order checks the policy, not the fear it generates in the people asked to comply with it: a Brennan Center survey found more than half of local election workers now worry about political interference, one county clerk reported being threatened with being dragged out of her office, and roughly 75 people who worked on election security across DHS, DOJ, and the intelligence community have resigned, been forced out, or seen their units dismantled since 2025.
The picture darkened further over the summer. DHS is appealing the ruling against its voter-roll database rather than complying with it, and in late August the agency had to walk back the noncitizen-voter figures it had been citing publicly — the underlying system keeps flagging naturalized citizens as noncitizens, an error acknowledged in its own reporting to NPR. On September 8, the administration asked the Supreme Court directly to let it use the overhauled system — called SAVE — ahead of the midterms, after a district court ruled in June that using it as a voter check violated privacy law; DHS told the Court the system has verified citizenship for more than 65 million voters across 26 states while flagging 28,635 potential noncitizens, a far smaller number than the initial figures the agency had to retract. Two more lawsuits, from the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, now argue the database scheme is unconstitutional on a different theory than the Social Security ruling: that the Elections Clause gives states and Congress, not the executive branch, the power to administer elections at all. A March 2026 executive order requires DHS to send every state a “citizenship list” built from that same disputed system by September 4 — sixty days ahead of the general election, on schedule regardless of the litigation. The agency’s reach has also widened past its own database: DHS Secretary Mullin asked Attorney General Blanche to open a Justice Department investigation into the Electronic Registration Information Center, a separate multistate voter-roll-maintenance consortium used by roughly nine states covering more than 48 million registered voters, over allegations it improperly shared personal data — and Homeland Security Investigations launched a coordinated “surge” of voter-fraud investigations across nine states running through mid-October, even as independent reporting has found the aggressive hunt turning up only a handful of confirmed noncitizen-voting cases nationwide. Separately, on August 24, the Supreme Court lifted one of two injunctions blocking a Trump executive order restricting mail-in ballots, 6-3 along ideological lines; the ruling was explicitly preliminary, with Justice Sotomayor’s dissent noting it “does not address whether the President’s attempts to interfere with states’ administration of the November 2026 elections are lawful” and “merely postpones adjudication of those challenges.” And on August 11, asked directly whether he would declare a national emergency to control the 2026 election if Congress didn’t pass his preferred voting legislation, Trump did not say no — he said “stranger things have happened.” Legal scholars note no emergency-powers statute actually confers authority over how elections are run, so the remark may be closer to bluster than to a real plan; what it demonstrates regardless is that a direct question about seizing control of an election got an ambiguous answer rather than a flat denial.
The mail-ballot fight reached a resolution of sorts before Election Day, and it moved in the opposite direction from most of what else is in this section. The August 24 ruling described above let a new Postal Service system — one that would block delivery of mail ballots to voters not on a list presubmitted by state election officials — move forward on a preliminary basis. When the underlying challenge came back to the Court on September 15 in Watson v. Republican National Committee, the outcome flipped: in a brief unsigned order, the Court left a lower court’s injunction against the new rule in place, writing that the government was “unlikely to succeed on the merits” of its defense — meaning mail voting in November will function largely as it has in past elections rather than under the new system. Only Justices Alito and Thomas dissented; Justice Kavanaugh, who had written separately in August warning that state and local officials “do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections,” joined the September majority blocking it outright. Trump called the ruling “a disaster” and “a big loss for Republicans.” It stands, so far, as one of the few places in this essay where the Court’s own preliminary and final rulings pointed in opposite directions within a single election cycle — and where the final word came down against the administration.
Redistricting has kept pace. Ten states have now enacted new congressional maps over the past year, Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee most recently, positioning Republicans to gain as many as sixteen or seventeen House seats this fall against six for Democrats — a margin that matters because Republicans hold 220 seats and can lose no more than two and keep the majority. Texas and Ohio are expected to redraw again before the midterms.
Not every mid-decade map has survived, though. On September 3, 2026, the Missouri Supreme Court blocked the state’s newly drawn GOP congressional map from taking effect, ruling that the underlying law “did not go into effect and will not go into effect unless and until approved by the voters,” and ordered a November referendum on the question. The state’s old 6-2 map — not the new one used in the August primary — will govern the 2026 general election while that referendum proceeds. Missouri Republicans asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, and on September 8 the Court declined: Justice Kavanaugh’s order left the state court’s block in place, rejecting the emergency request to revive the new map for this cycle. A separate federal court had reached the opposite conclusion in parallel litigation that same day, ordering the new map used instead — leaving Missouri’s map in open conflict between state and federal rulings for roughly forty-eight hours. The conflict didn’t last: a coalition backing the referendum, People Not Politicians, returned to the Supreme Court with a new emergency application, and on September 10 the Court granted it, in an unsigned order with no noted dissents, directing Missouri to use the 2022 map — not the new GOP-favored map — for the November election. Missouri’s Secretary of State, who had continued treating the new map as valid through the standoff, still faces a contempt hearing over defying the state court’s original September 3 order. It’s a useful counterweight to the overall redistricting trend: a state court applying its own constitution’s referendum process stopped a mid-cycle map cold, and the U.S. Supreme Court, after one brief detour through a conflicting federal ruling, ultimately let that result stand rather than overriding it — which is closer to the ordinary check-and-balance story than most of what else is happening on this front.
4. Declaring war
What began as a limited set of strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities has become a war. On February 28, 2026, U.S. and Israeli forces launched Operation Epic Fury, an airstrike campaign that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, along with several family members and other senior officials — the assassination of a sitting head of state, which opened rather than concluded a monthslong armed conflict between the United States and Iran. No declaration of war was sought or issued. Under the 1973 War Powers Act, a president has sixty days to end hostilities absent congressional authorization; Trump’s position, laid out in a May 1 letter to Congress, was that a ceasefire reached April 8 mooted the need to ask at all.
Congress disagreed, and did something it had never done before in the fifty-plus-year history of the War Powers Act: both chambers passed a resolution directing the president to remove U.S. forces from the conflict. The House voted 215-208 on June 3, with four Republicans — Thomas Massie, Brian Fitzpatrick, Tom Barrett, and Warren Davidson — joining every Democrat. The Senate followed on June 23, 50-48, with Bill Cassidy, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and Rand Paul crossing over. Trump dismissed the vote publicly as “a meaningless vote” that interfered with what he called his “final negotiations to end the War,” and the Senate itself walked the rebuke back the very next day, rejecting a follow-up measure after Trump pressed the Republicans who had crossed over. The ceasefire held through the early summer, then collapsed on July 8; by mid-July the U.S. had resumed nightly strikes for a week straight, reinstated a naval blockade of Iranian ports, and hit targets including a desalination plant serving civilian populations. A second, negotiated pause followed and collapsed again in August after strikes on three ships in the Strait of Hormuz; Senator Adam Schiff filed a new War Powers Resolution after that second collapse, a second attempt at the same check Congress had already tried and seen disregarded once. As of early September, the war is past its 180th day, and Iran has struck Jordan and the UAE in retaliation for U.S. strikes on Larak Island — pulling two more countries directly into the conflict. Independent trackers put the war’s toll at thousands of military and civilian casualties, alongside a fuel and shipping crisis rippling through global oil, gas, and aviation markets. The conflict has widened regionally in other ways, too — Israel invaded parts of Lebanon in a resumed war against Hezbollah beginning March 2, and Iran has separately retaliated against U.S. facilities in Bahrain and Kuwait.
The fighting escalated again in the first week of September. The U.S. resumed a “tanker for tanker” campaign on September 1, disabling the engine rooms of Iranian oil tankers at anchor and extending strikes to the terminal through which Iran had exported roughly 90 percent of its crude before the war began. Iran responded by striking a U.S. unmanned vessel in the Strait of Hormuz on September 6 and hitting Kuwait with missiles and drones — a second Gulf state, beyond Jordan and the UAE, now directly targeted. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s chief negotiator and parliament speaker, declared that “the era of ‘proportionate responses’ is over.” And in a September 4 briefing where he was ostensibly discussing an unrelated matter, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick disclosed, then corrected himself on unrelated specifics, that eighteen U.S. service members have died in the Iran conflict — the first official acknowledgment of American combat deaths in a war Congress never declared and twice voted, unsuccessfully, to end.
The escalation continued through the following week. The U.S. sank five Iranian oil tankers, and Iran responded by claiming strikes on ten ships near the Strait of Hormuz, with at least one seafarer killed and another missing. An Iranian missile destroyed a U.S. A-10 Thunderbolt attack aircraft, and Iranian forces struck the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan a second time, damaging multiple American aircraft on the ground. Trump told reporters on September 9 that he expected the war to end after the November midterms because Iran “can’t hold out any longer,” even as Vice President Vance, Secretary of State Rubio, and other officials reportedly warned him privately that Iran could continue resisting under blockade well past that point — into 2029, on some estimates. Trump also floated striking a fortified Iranian site referred to in briefings as Pickaxe Mountain, saying “a little activity” detected there might warrant it. Nothing in that sequence involves a new congressional vote of any kind; the war continues to run entirely on the president’s own authority, seven months past its start and past two failed attempts by Congress to end it.
The week after brought a third attempt by Congress and the clearest public accounting yet of the war’s cost. On September 15, the House passed a war-powers resolution for the third time, 220-204, again directing the president to end U.S. involvement — seven Republicans crossed over this time, up from four on each of the two earlier votes, though the measure still has no path to the president’s desk, where he would almost certainly veto it if it ever arrived. The same week, the Pentagon’s own inspector general released a report acknowledging what officials had mostly avoided saying publicly: the war has caused a “strategic” shortage in certain U.S. munitions stockpiles and roughly $184 million in damage to American bases across the Middle East from Iranian strikes. In the Strait of Hormuz, Oman announced it had finalized a separate agreement with Iran intended to keep the waterway open, even as attacks on shipping there continued and Oman searched for crew members missing from a tanker hit days earlier. None of it produced a fourth month, let alone a seventh, in which the war ran through any check but the president’s own judgment about when to stop.
Iran is not the only theater. Since returning to office, the administration has struck targets in at least seven countries, including an intensified campaign against Houthi forces in Yemen (Operation Rough Rider, March–May 2025, which reporting tied to dozens of civilian deaths) and a sharp escalation in Somalia, where the U.S. carried out more strikes in 2025 alone than the Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations combined. Separately, and distinct from both the Iran war and the Venezuela raid described below, the military has since September 2025 run a sustained campaign — Operation Southern Spear — of lethal strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific suspected, but not judicially established, of carrying drugs. As of late August 2026, at least 227 people had been killed across 68 strikes on vessels, including foreign nationals such as two men from Trinidad and Tobago whose families are now suing the U.S. government under the Death on the High Seas Act and the Alien Tort Statute. The operation itself went quiet for more than two months over the summer before resuming August 23 with no public explanation for either the pause or the restart; a September 2 investigation by The Intercept began referring to those killed as civilians rather than as suspected traffickers. Lawmakers from both parties have questioned the legal basis for killing suspected traffickers without trial, the Pentagon’s own inspector general opened a probe into the operation, and a measure that would have required congressional authorization for further strikes failed to pass.
Separately, in January 2026, U.S. military forces captured Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in a raid on Caracas and brought him to the United States to stand trial — an action critics describe, without much dispute over the underlying facts, as indistinguishable from an act of war, carried out with no congressional vote beforehand of any kind. A bipartisan Senate resolution requiring congressional approval before additional force in Venezuela passed the Senate 52-47 with five Republicans crossing over, and died in the House on a 215-215 tie.
Of every front in this essay, the power to declare war, assigned by Article I to Congress and Congress alone, is now the one tested most directly, most repeatedly, and checked least successfully — not through any single unauthorized strike, but through a full-scale war opened by assassinating a foreign head of state, a first-ever bicameral vote ordering the president out of it that he simply declined to follow, and a parallel campaign of lethal strikes against boats and foreign nationals that has drawn lawsuits, an inspector general investigation, and bipartisan alarm without ever reaching a binding vote.
5. Use of troops and detention at home
Immigration detention has grown 84 percent in a year, into tent camps built on military bases, faster than the number of judges available to hear those cases. In the capital, a National Guard deployment framed as a thirty-day emergency has been extended through 2029 — the length of a presidential term — over the formal objection of the city’s own elected government and a federal judge’s finding that the deployment is illegal.
This is also the front where the strongest check has actually held. The Supreme Court, 6-3, kept in place a lower court’s order barring the administration from deploying National Guard troops to Chicago, ruling on the meaning of the federal statute that lets a president federalize a state’s Guard only when he is “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.” That ruling did more than block one deployment: it set a legal standard now shaping how courts are treating similar threatened deployments in Oregon and elsewhere, which makes this one of the few fronts in this essay where a Supreme Court ruling constrained the administration rather than freed it.
A Constitutional Wreck(on)ing — A Five-Part Series