"What 'constitutional crisis? It seems to me the Constitution is in place, working as usual. There are some legal issues in play, but what's constitutional..."

"... other than that some of the various actors in the drama have positions defined in the Constitution and obtained by normal constitutional procedures? It was assumed that I would excitedly spring into action because of this assumed 'constitutional crisis,' but my response was that I felt distanced from all the ugly divisions, though I thought some good might ultimately come from the crumbling of the 2 political parties. They were 'getting what they deserve,' I said darkly, adding, 'We all are.' That brought the conversation in for a landing, and as I walked on, I thought, What constitutional crisis? It isn't a constitutional crisis. It's emotional politics, a national nervous breakdown."

That's just something I wrote in August 2018. I'm seeing it this morning because the first post of the day has some discussion of tags, because I created a new tag "origins of Russia investigation," because longstanding tag for the Russia investigation was "Trump troubles," and I imagined trouble for me if I labeled that post as if it were trouble for Trump rather than his antagonists.

DavidD asked if there's a tag for "Althouse troubles," and I said:

I don't blog about my troubles, any actual personal difficulties. What a different blog this would be if I did! Sorry, but I'm protecting my privacy enough that anything that would deserve that tag would not make it to the blog.

The closest thing I have is emotional Althouse.

So I looked to see what had gone up recently under that tag. How personal do I get? There's my annoyance at the badness of residential architecture, the time a man in a motorized wheelchair plowed into me, and someone was mean to me on Facebook.

And then there's the one I'm quoting at the top of this post, "Am I not all excited about the 'constitutional crisis' — me, a former constitutional law professor?" The question was something a "lawyer friend" of mine asked when he ran into me as I was walking along the shore of Lake Mendota, minding my own business.

The phrase "the constitutional crisis" must have been what everyone was talking about — what exactly was it back then?

And these days we're hearing "constitutional crisis" and what exactly is it now? The emotion of Emotional Althouse last August was cool and distanced, and it is now.