CBS’s Crawford Breaks News to Liberal Viewers: No, We’re Not in a Constitutional Crisis

Curtis Houck
February 14th, 2025 2:30 PM

Text to Speech

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Three days after CBS Mornings Plus shacked up with the rest of the liberal media’s manufactured narrative about the country either in the midst of or about to enter “a constitutional crisis,” CBS’s longtime Supreme Court correspondent Jan Crawford showed up on Friday’s show to burst the bubble of liberals that we are not, in fact, in a state of chaos.

Co-host Tony Dokoupil didn’t mention his own show in the open, but at least laid out both sides of the coin, starting with the left:

Depending on where you get your news, you may have started the week hearing this phrase. Constitutional crisis. There are concerns out there for some as the president continues to issue executive orders. Those orders have then faced lawsuits and those lawsuits have then faced pushback from the President and his allies. To no surprise, the perception of these battles, their legitimacy likely depends on her politics. 

After playing a clip of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt laying waste to this on Wednesday and then citing a few of Trump’s moves to shrink government, Crawford didn’t mince words.

Crawford explained everyone needs “to take a breath and meet the in middle” by recognizing Trump’s moves are “pushing that legal envelope” and “some of” his actions will be struck down, yet “there’s also no question that some of the judges are going a little too far in putting the brakes on actions that Trump clearly has the authority to do.”

She then dropped the kicker that there’s not, in fact, a “constitutional crisis” in our midst: 

[W]hat does this mean? I think this shows that at least here the system is working like it is supposed to. There’s no constitutional crisis right now. People are suing over these programs, these actions. Judges are blocking them. Trump is then appealing that. He is not ignoring judicial orders. He is filing court papers, saying that he has the authority. And, on some of these, he is going to win.

Co-host Adriana Diaz moved to a specific example of Trump “trying to freeze federal spending” and asked Crawford to predict how that’d shake out.

Crawford disappointed Diaz by saying “it depends” because presidents “can take a pause for some of this stuff and get stock of some of these — take stock of some of these programs” such as President Biden dragging his feet on border wall funding while it might not be legal if “there are deadlines” attached.

“I know we all love to talk about the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, but that is a problem because that law says that the President, honestly, cannot withhold these kind of funds. Trump is going to argue that is unconstitutional,” she explained.

Crawford closed with another jab at the doomsday crowd that, contrary to what some of them likely believe, the Trump administration has been “very strategic” and thought out in their executive orders and moves t  o downsize the executive branch with some likely to make it and others struck down.

“[L]ook, these executive orders...were not written overnight. I mean, they — they spent months on these executive orders and they targeted unpopular political programs or issues and they also targeted areas of the law that they thought the Supreme Court may be about to head towards,” she stated, citing withholding money for government agencies and firing heads of government agencies like the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

To see the relevant CBS transcript from February 14, click here.

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