How to Recognize a Constitutional Crisis

How does one prepare for a constitutional crisis? Stock up on canned goods and copies of “The Federalist”? It might be best to take precautions if we really are, as Democrats say, on the verge of another man-made, unnatural disaster in Washington. Senator Elizabeth Warren sees a threat to “both the Constitution and our democracy itself” in Senate Republicans’ refusal to consider replacing Justice Antonin Scalia before President Obama leaves office; Hillary Clinton, in a series of tweets, decried this “dishonor” to our founding document. Not everyone is so apprehensive; where some see a crisis, others see “strain.” “The world won’t crumble,” Bruce Ackerman, a professor at Yale Law School, told Emily Bazelon of the Times, whose “quick poll” of five constitutional scholars, despite its small sample size, established this as a consensus view, at least in the faculty lounge.