On the Republican Party's Constitutional Coup

House Republicans aren’t reforming the courts—they’re dismantling them to protect Trump

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And when a political party writes legislation specifically designed to strip federal judges of their power to enforce court orders against government officials, we have moved far beyond normal politics into something that can only be called what it is: a constitutional coup.

Let us speak plainly about what has just occurred. House Republicans have embedded within their domestic policy bill a provision that would eliminate federal judges' contempt powers unless those judges had previously ordered financial bonds from plaintiffs. This is not arcane procedural reform. This is not good-government legislation aimed at improving judicial efficiency. This is the deliberate construction of presidential immunity from judicial oversight, written into law and applied retroactively to shield the Trump administration from ongoing legal jeopardy.

The timing reveals the intent with surgical precision. Even as we speak, federal judges across the country are weighing contempt proceedings against Trump administration officials who are flagrantly violating court orders. Judge James Boasberg has threatened contempt over flights illegally deporting Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador. Judge Paula Xinis is considering contempt charges over the administration's refusal to facilitate the release of a wrongly deported American resident from a Salvadoran prison. In Boston, a federal judge has raised the possibility of contempt against officials who violated an order blocking deportations to countries other than deportees' nations of origin.

The Republican response? Retroactively strip these judges of any power to enforce their orders.

This is not politics. This is not even authoritarian overreach in the traditional sense. This is something more brazen: the open construction of a legal framework within which the President of the United States operates above the law. When a political party crafts emergency legislation to immunize its leader from judicial oversight in real time, it has ceased to be a participant in democratic governance and has become an accessory to tyranny.

I have spent considerable time in Notes from the Circus documenting how we arrived at this moment—how libertarian-to-fascist pipelines create intellectual frameworks that justify the unjustifiable, how the “starve the beast” strategy engineers fiscal crises to dismantle democratic institutions, how the systematic erosion of shared reality makes it possible for intelligent people to rationalize what previous generations would have recognized as obvious authoritarianism.

But this moment transcends those analyses. This is the hour when pretense ends and power shows its true face.

The constitutional implications are staggering. Article III of the Constitution establishes an independent judiciary as a co-equal branch of government precisely to serve as a check on executive power. The contempt power is not some judicial luxury—it is the mechanism by which courts enforce their orders and maintain the rule of law. Without it, judicial rulings become mere suggestions, and the separation of powers collapses into executive supremacy.

What makes this particularly breathtaking is the retroactive application. This isn't prospective reform based on constitutional principle. This is emergency legislation designed to rescue a specific administration from specific legal jeopardy at a specific moment in time. When lawmakers craft bills to retroactively shield their allies from ongoing legal proceedings, they have moved from governance to conspiracy.

The pretense that we can treat this as normal political disagreement has become a form of collaboration with authoritarianism itself. The Democratic Party's response—technical objections about procedure and parliamentary rules—is catastrophically inadequate to the moment. When one side is playing by democratic norms and the other is systematically dismantling the constitutional order, procedural complaints become a form of suicide by etiquette.

Throughout my work, I have returned to a simple refrain: Two plus two equals four. This isn't stylistic repetition; it's an epistemic anchor. When power tries to convince us that judicial orders are optional, that constitutional constraints are suggestions, that the systematic construction of executive immunity is merely “policy reform,” we must hold fast to what we know to be true.

Two plus two equals four means that when Republicans write legislation specifically to shield Trump from judicial oversight, they are engineering a constitutional coup—regardless of what they call it, regardless of how they package it, regardless of what procedural justifications they offer.

What we are witnessing is not the familiar dance of partisan politics but the methodical construction of autocracy. The Republican Party has revealed itself as an organization willing to destroy the foundational structures of American democracy rather than accept the possibility that their leader might be held accountable for breaking the law.

This is not hyperbole. This is not partisan rhetoric. This is the documented, empirical reality of what the Republican Party has become: an institution dedicated not to conservative governance but to the preservation of Donald Trump's power by any means necessary, including the evisceration of constitutional government itself.

I have watched too many institutions—and too many of our friends—default to a posture of submission disguised as pragmatism. They want to preserve norms by not breaking decorum. But the norms are already broken. They want to save democracy by negotiating with those dismantling it. But negotiation assumes shared premises. And those premises no longer hold.

There comes a moment in every collapse when the people who see it most clearly are not those on the inside, but those willing to say, out loud, what everyone else is still trying to euphemize. We are in such a moment.

The time for treating this as politics as usual has passed. The time for diplomatic language and measured responses has passed. The time for pretending that we are dealing with a loyal opposition has passed.

We are dealing with authoritarians. We are dealing with people who have chosen power over principle, party over country, and one man's whims over the Constitution of the United States.

The center must be held—not because it is easy, but because it is ours to hold. And holding it requires the courage to name what is happening without euphemism: This is a constitutional coup. And those enabling it are no longer conservatives, no longer a legitimate political party, but conspirators in the dismantling of American democracy.

It is time to call them what they are.