MSNBC Legal Analyst Warns Morning Joe Against Prematurely Branding Trump Court Order ‘Chaos’ A ‘Constitutional Crisis’

MSNBC legal analyst Danny Cevallos warned Morning Joe hosts against branding federal judiciary pushback to President Donald Trump’s actions as a “constitutional crisis” until the moment that the administration “refuses to follow” court orders.

The take followed a move by a federal judge in Rhode Island ordering the Trump administration to “immediately” comply with his directive to unfreeze federal grants, following claims from attorneys general of multiple Democratic states that the administration was ignoring the order.

This, in turn, followed a claim by Vice President JD Vance on Sunday that federal judges were not allowed to “control” the “legitimate” power of the executive branch after Elon Musk’s DOGE was blocked in another order from accessing Treasury Department payment systems.

Amid commentary about the court orders, Morning Joe host Mika Brzezinski cited The New York Times front page, saying, “Basically, we’re in a constitutional crisis.”

Pushing back on the idea and urging more caution in how commentators define a crisis, Cevallos offered his definition based on history.

I think we need to be careful with the term constitutional crisis because, as I define it, that would be a situation where the constitution doesn’t have an answer and there is a pressing conflict.

The flurry of executive orders, the chaos, that I think doesn’t get us to crisis yet. It is irritating for the courts, it is challenging. It could lead to a serious problem if, as you said, they become too congested with dealing with these orders.

The crisis occurs and we’ve already talked about it at the moment when there is a court order and the president or the administration refuses to follow it, because historically, we don’t really have a clear answer for what to do in that situation.

On the first half of it, issuing a bunch of executive orders, not only do we know that the courts can handle it, they already did this back in 2017. This is the same M.O. The Trump administration then would just fire out executive orders – it felt like they weren’t even spell checking them. And then they would let the courts prune them like the proverbial bonsai tree, or they would just withdraw them and go back to the drawing board. It’s probably not the most efficient way of doing it. It’s chaotic. As you said, it’s problematic.

But ‘constitutional crisis’ for me is the moment the court issues an order and the administration resists. You could say that the last notable occurrence was when [former President Richard] Nixon initially refused to comply with a subpoena issued by the Supreme Court. Eventually he capitulated.

But history is full of these near crises examples. The question is, what do we do going forward?

Watch above via MSNBC.