(Or, the System is bearing up, once cool heads figure things out)

The orderly legislative and executive behavior of old, constrained by familiar, conventional decency and norms, has long been easily addressed by the mountains of jurisprudence and judicial precedent that has been built up over many decades — case histories built up and upon petitioners’ grievances that arose in the familiar environment of near-universal agreement on the supremacy of the rule of law.

During normal times, when legislators infringed on established rights, or when the Executive Branch stepped outside of its delegated powers, that gentleman’s agreement known as the Rule of Law stepped in to adjudicate the matter.

What makes today different is not so much a failure of the system so much as the system’s near-complete lack of preparation for the current environment in which a cognitively subnormal lunatic, rather than a gentleman, would rapid-fire untested executive orders and baseless directives the likes of which have never been litigated and adjudicated before, due to lack of prior necessity.

The result of our system’s lack of experience with the new lows attempted by Trump is the confusion and bewilderment that shocks our system today: a system unprepared for such a novel threat to the Constitutional order as the human immune system was for the onslaught of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19.

Like COVID-19, it’s not that our system couldn’t handle it given enough experience, exposure, and the built-up immunity provided by decades and reams of case law and judicial precedent. Our system can, in fact, handle the assault, once it regains its footing and its cooler heads, like dispassionate scientists and researchers, learn to apply the existing biology and anatomy of the Constitution to this new and heretofore unknown social pathogen.

Our system was unprepared for Trump’s blatantly illegal and unethical targeting of the law firm Perkins and Cole, because decent people — and even not so decent people — had never attempted such a naked act of executive aggression before. But the system responded to the novel Trump pathogen by realizing that such an order would deprive defendants of their unencumbered right to choose counsel.

Sure enough; there was a way; our judicial branch looked at the Bill of Rights and summoned up a new strain of antibodies to respond to the threat.

The stupidly laughable attempt to “eradicate anti-Christian bias” is similarly unconstitutional on its face. It tasks the federal government to judge what is Christian and what isn’t; even our current, tainted Supreme Court still observes the First Amendment’s requirement of religious neutrality, and the executive order addressing alleged anti-Christian bias directs it to behave in a non-neutral manner.

Don’t mistake this for an excuse to let our guard down. With Trumpism, we remain under attack by a true Nazi Germany version 2.0 that would love to see a lot of us dead.

Just take this as some reassurance that our system is still holding up, once cooler heads figure out the legal responses to the untested threats that now bombard it.

So, don’t panic, for panic is what MAGA wants.