What IS a Constitutional Crisis? The phrase "constitutional crisis" isn't a legal term at all, but it does serve to describe several well known and acknowledged types of government, legal, national security and executive emergencies. But in the end, wouldn't it be fair to say that "constitutional crisis" means to the Constitution what "psychotic lapse" means to mental illness? Even a seasoned medical professional might struggle a bit to lay out the specific set of morbidities that clearly define such a lapse but they can certainly tell one when they see one. If congressional Republicans fail to hold Trump accountable for firing Mueller, I daresay that would accurately describe a crisis of fidelity, but it would naturally follow that if we are in a crisis of fidelity, then we must by necessity also be in a concomitant operational crisis, because the former paints us into the corner where we are confounded by the latter, thus the two are inseparable. Political scientist Keith Whittington describes it as a set of “circumstances in which the constitutional order itself is failing.” In government itself, an "operational crisis" might be when the Constitution can't tell us how to resolve a political dispute. Or, there is a "fidelity crisis" where the Constitution lays out the rules to tell us what to do but those rules aren't being obeyed. But what about when the Constitution fails to constrain political disputes within some accepted semblance of normalcy? Representatives and leaders from both parties insist that they are acting constitutionally, but that it's their opponent which is not. You might be reminded of The Civil War. Clearly the one thing that all of these have in common is some kind of tipping point, where most if not all are forced to recognize that we are testing the legal and constitutional order of governance. Maybe it is better to use a term like "constitutional rot" instead, where faith in the values and structural integrity of the Constitution itself have clearly eroded despite the legal structure remaining in place. But if a president is attempting to fire his way out of facing the wheels of justice, does that legal structure still have the necessary integrity to uphold the values in the Constitution or not? Constitutional rot therefore must eventually lead to a constitutional crisis, both of fidelity and in terms of operation itself. A termite infested building might stand for decades after the bugs have set in but one day your Aunt Claire might go crashing through the kitchen floor and wind up head over heels in the basement among the rotted timbers. A host body cannot restore life after a parasitic infection has hollowed out and destroyed the organs. If we do not apply prophylactic measures, the host body succumbs needlessly for want of antibiotics and one reaches the tipping point where it is too late, and the victim dies. Termite infested wood does not grow solid again. Rancid meat doesn't return to freshness. Fidelity can be restored. Rot however, cannot.