Take Care is pleased to host a symposium on Constitutional Coup. In this important new book, Jon Michaels shows how separating the state from its public servants, practices, and institutions harms our Constitution, and threatens the stability of the Republic. Contributors will assess his analysis in light of developments under Trump. 

Here are the entries in the symposium:

You’re So Vain … You Probably Think This Book’s About You

Jon Michaels | 1/8/18

An introduction to this week's symposium on my new book, 'Constitutional Coup: Privatization’s Threat to the American Republic' 

Process Matters Too

Brianne Gorod | 1/9/18 

Trump is undermining the administrative separation of powers by circumventing the Senate’s advice-and-consent process in naming leaders of executive branch agencies

Bureaucratic Exit and Loyalty under Trump

Jennifer Nou | 1/9/18

Fostering a greater sense of bureaucratic loyalty will help to ensure that when the going gets tough, the tough don’t get going.

The Politics of Administrative Reform

Josh Chafetz | 1/10/18 

Michaels is absolutely right in his diagnosis of the current state of administrative governance. And his book could well prove an important step towards fixing it. But if that fix comes, it is far more likely to be primarily via those politicians than by the judges they appoint.

An Ode to the Career Bureaucracy

Rebecca Ingber | 1/10/18

It would be a delicious irony if the President’s attempts to circumvent the internal checks on his authority were ultimately to serve to revitalize the external constraints on presidential power, as has been a legacy of presidents past.

Let’s Not Make A Constitutional Case Out Of This

Ian Millhiser | 1/11/18

Is an administrative separation of powers mandated by the Constitution, as Michaels suggests that it is?

De-Privatizing Our Public Philosophy

Peter Shane | 1/11/18

Michaels understates the danger posed by a lack of social solidarity in America, a state of alienation Americans feel from one another that has been deliberately fed by right-wing politicians for at least the last four decades.

Privatization’s Other Frontiers

Kate Shaw | 1/12/18

We must also focus on ideological outsourcing and privatization by state governments

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