Post-constitutional? Yeah, about that.

The Washington Post writes today about Trump whisperer Russ Vought:

Trump loyalist pushes ‘post-constitutional’ vision for second term

“We are living in a post-Constitutional time,” Vought wrote in a seminal 2022 essay, which argued that the left has corrupted the nation’s laws and institutions. Last week, after a jury convicted Trump of falsifying business records, Vought tweeted: “Do not tell me that we are living under the Constitution.”

I read Vought's "seminal essay" so you don't have to, and it turns out to be a lot less interesting than you might think. Vought thinks we're living in a post-constitutional era not because he wants to shred the Constitution but because he thinks liberals have wrecked things over the past hundred years. He's one of those conservatives who wants to return to the Lochner era and get rid of all the Progressive Era and New Deal projects that created independent agencies and turned interstate commerce into a justification for overweening federal power. Yawn.

This is mostly crazy stuff, but it's a dime a dozen among Federalist Society types these days. Still, maybe Vought goes a little further than most. Here he is explaining why it's OK for states to take control of the border:

We have looked to the Constitution for what the Founders would do if one was a current governor of a border state, and lo and behold, we found Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3, articulating that states cannot engage in war making unless invaded. And in our research, we found that they did not mean threats from foreign nation states, but rather smugglers, militias, Indian tribes, etc.

This is ridiculous. "Invasion," both then and now, refers to an organized force attacking the country with violence and malice. Individuals acting independently with no intent to conquer or kill do not constitute an invasion under any plausible interpretation.

I wonder sometimes how these folks actually want to govern the country. I mean, suppose you agreed with their basic criticism that agencies can't be allowed independence from the president; that Congress can't delegate its rulemaking powers; and that most of the civil service should be political, changing with each new administration.

Suppose you agreed with all that. We're still living in a country of 330 million people and an era of immense complexity. It's not physically possible for Congress to do all the rulemaking. It's not physically possible to appoint a million new civil servants every few years. It's not physically possible to govern a jet-age, atomic-age, computer-age, internet-age society using rules from 1787—or even 1905.

So in practical terms, what are they really thinking? I find it a mystery.