JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Good evening and welcome to Washington Week, and welcome to just another week in Donald Trump's Washington.

People throw around the term constitutional crisis all the time, and I include myself in the category of people here, but what does it actually mean?

Would it be a constitutional crisis if the president defies a federal judge's order on the detention of immigrants?

Are we already in such a crisis?

I have many questions.

Luckily, I also have very smart people at this table to help us understand these issues.

Joining me tonight, Eugene Daniels is a senior Washington correspondent and co-host of The Weekend on MSNBC.

David Ignatius is a columnist at The Washington Post.

Michael Scherer is my colleague and a staff writer at The Atlantic.

And Nancy Youssef is a national security correspondent at The Wall Street Journal.

Thank you all for joining me, another no news week in Washington.

Let me go right to it, David.

This is going to feel like a homework assignment, but what's the definition of a constitutional crisis?

And you cannot use ChatGPT to answer this question.

DAVID IGNATIUS, Columnist, The Washington Post: So, my definition would be constitutional crisis is when the president defies the Supreme Court.

We're heading in that direction.

The president is responding to sharp pushback from the chief justice by pushing back himself.

Right wing Twitter is talking about a judicial coup.

This is, you know, increasingly, I think, a dangerous moment.

The president has gone after the.

The executive agencies, he's going after congressionally authorized agencies and programs.

He's going after the military, now he's going after the judiciary.

I do think that ahead of us is a confrontation in which the Supreme Court is going to decide what executive authority the president has.

It'll be a landmark case.

It's coming.

But until we reach that moment, Jeff, I wouldn't say we're at the constitutional crisis.

That's the moment where it will happen and we'll see what the court does.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Just to illustrate something you're talking about, I want you to all listen to the president sounding a bit ominous on the subject of judges he doesn't like.

DONALD TRUMP, U.S. President: We have very bad judges, and these are judges that shouldn't be allowed.

I think they -- I think, at a certain point, you have to start looking at what do you do when you have a rogue judge.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, you know, obviously this is -- comments like these are what prompted the chief justice of the United States, John Roberts, to mildly rebuke the president and say, you know, you don't -- almost like schoolhouse rock style, you don't get rid of judges because you disagree with him.

That's not the system.

But, you know, David, you said something interesting.

You said, when it goes to the Supreme Court, if he defies the Supreme Court.

But, Michael, we have a situation right now where he seemed to be defying a judge at the district court level about a live issue.

That was the movement of illegal aliens, immigrants, undocumented, alleged gang members, et cetera, out of the country.

So, why is that not a constitutional crisis?

MICHAEL SCHERER, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: Well, I would say it's not a constitutional crisis because that judge is still having hearings.

There was another hearing today.

There was a hearing yesterday.

He could put sanctions on the government next week if he finds against the president.

President could then appeal those sanctions, and that's how the process works.

That's how we roll through.

Now, it's not unheard of that a litigant before a court would defy a judge.

What would be unheard of is if it goes to the end of the road, as David said, especially in a court where, you know, six of the nine recently ruled in Trump's favor in Trump in the election interference case, and three of them he appointed.

So, if he defies this court, that will be a remarkable moment, I think.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, Eugene, you agree that it's not a crisis yet?

It's just probing a bit?

EUGENE DANIELS, Senior Washington Correspondent, MSNBC: Not a constitutional crisis.

I think a lot of people would say it is some type of crisis.

No, but I think they're right, like we have a system.

And the apex of this, the peak of it is in that crash is when we're at the end of the road, as Michael was just saying, and we're not there yet.

It doesn't appear that they're slowing down, this White House.

They continue to say like, you know, we are going to do what these judges say, but then you have the president saying these other things, so there're these conflicting messages.

And I think the most important part of this is there are three branches of government, right?

They are supposed to be co-equal branches of government.

The legislative branch also has a hand to play.

So, if Donald Trump is to, let's say, at the end of the day, defy the Supreme Court and do what -- does whatever he wants to do, then you have the legislative branch that is supposed to do something, that Congress should step in and do something as a part of that.

But you have to be co-equal.

Everyone has to agree they're co-equal.

And at this point, the Republicans in Congress are just fine with Donald Trump of telling them what to do.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It doesn't seem like Donald Trump believes that they're co-equal.

But, Nancy -- yes.

But, Nancy, so you just made an interesting point about Congress.

Maybe this is not a constitutional collapse.

Maybe it's sort of constitutional narcolepsy in a kind of way.

I'm looking for a saying here to see if it catches on.

No.

Like there's a kind of collapse here in the sense that Congress -- the judges are doing their thing right now.

Congress, Republican ruled in both houses, Congress doesn't seem to be seized by this issue of defiance or this idea that judges I don't like, I as the president, don't like, should be impeached.

Where's Congress?

NANCY YOUSSEF, National Security Correspondent, The Wall Street Journal: Well, let's start -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Don't say at the end of Pennsylvania, by the way.

NANCY YOUSSEF: Oh, then I'm done.

I got nothing.

Well, I think it comes back to your original question of what is a constitutional crisis and the fact that we don't agree on it and that the party doesn't agree and that Congress doesn't agree on it, so therefore there's not a resolution on how to address it.

If you believe a constitutional crisis is when we get to the point where constitutional rights can't guide us to a resolution of conflict, then I think there's an agreement of sort of congressional intervention.

And having said that, if you agree, if you believe that a judge rules incorrectly, there's a role for Congress as well.

So, to Eugene's point, these ideas of checks and balances they happen throughout.

I think the challenges, because we're seeing a real flood of the zone in terms of some of these challenges, a disagreement about what defies meets defiance versus testing boundaries.

I think how that's mapping out on the hill is that you're not seeing a uniform response in terms of how to address it.

EUGENE DANIELS: In Congress itself, when Donald Trump defied them and said, I'm not going to -- you know, DOGE is going to do whatever it wants.

And these organizations that you guys created, we're not going to spend those monies.

We're not going to do that.

They don't even care if he does that.

So, I don't see them jumping in if he's having beef with judges, I just don't see it happening.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: David, you've watched this stuff for a while and, it just -- it struck me that in ordinary times, a chief justice of the United States, rebuking, or however you want to term what Chief Justice Roberts did, that would be a momentous story, rebuking the president of the United States for saying things that are out of the bounds of this idea of co-equality among the branches.

How odd is this moment historically?

And, B, let's say it goes to the Supreme Court, let's say the Supreme Court rules against Donald Trump.

It's not impossible.

Obviously, people on the right are worried about Amy Coney Barrett and her in independence from the movement.

What would it look like the day -- what would America look like the day after Trump said, I'm not listening to the Supreme Court?

DAVID IGNATIUS: So, you know, that's a moment that we dread to imagine what authority in the end would the Supreme Court have to enforce its ruling against the president.

And in the end, I think we would have a constitutional crisis.

We would have the people, I hope, enraged at the defiance.

I mean, you know, that's a direct assault on the Constitution.

Every official of the United States government swears an oath to the Constitution.

They need to be reminded of that.

Every member of Congress surely understands that an attack on the Supreme Court of the United States goes to the very heart of what our country is, what the founders imagine.

You take a look at the Constitution, it couldn't be clearer, you know?

It just enumerates the powers of each branch.

Article 3, talking about the powers of the judiciary couldn't be clearer.

And that's what Trump is going at.

All this talk that Trump is encouraging about judges, you know, issuing orders, blocking things, calling that a judicial coup.

When Roberts questions his authority, he waited a day and then he came right back and attacked Roberts by name and said, Roberts must immediately, in all caps, fix this or bad things will happen.

MICHAEL SCHERER: There's another way of interpreting what the president's doing right now, which is he went to the Justice Department last week and told a story about Bobby Knight, the basketball coach, and how great he was at working the refs.

It's clearly in his mind.

It's also true that a lot of the things his administration wants to do, it needs the court to change current legal interpretation to do.

He needs judges.

Either he's going to go, you know, totally rip up the Constitution and go it alone, or he's going to do what they've said they're going to do, which is to challenge birthright citizenship, to challenge the impoundment act, to challenge all these laws that are on the books right now that are interpreted as legal right now that he doesn't think are legal.

And so I think a way of looking at what this is what he is doing here, and he did it in the first term, is he's threatening judges.

He's saying, look, I'll make your life hard.

If you defy me, I'm going to call you out.

I'm going to make everything difficult around you.

And he's doing a Bobby Knight.

He's throwing the chair, you know, into the middle of the basketball court.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Nancy, I don't want to ask you to speculate, but could you speculate on the likelihood that Donald Trump actually exceeds all of these red lines based on the first couple of months of this administration.

I mean, it seems implausible to my American brain that such a thing could happen in federal government, but -- NANCY YOUSSEF: Well, I think to my, to the point you just made is because they're not using just one all.

Usually when we've had constitutional and challenges, it's been over one issue.

The flooding of the zone I think is having real impact in that.

They might lose on birthright but win on something else, and so that it allows us to sort of extend itself and go on for extended periods of time.

I think the one thing that sort of gives me hope is once we get to that point of a constitutional crisis, where it's defiance and it's open, we are saying that the country's ruled by one, and the spirit of this country, I don't think would allow for that.

It's not just the Constitution, but the very nature of this country has fought against one person ruling to get to that crisis is one person now ruling, the president.

And so that's where I'm optimistic.

And I think, practically speaking, the number of cases that have come forward is such that I don't think it'll be a straight line.

It'll be some cases they win, some cases they lose, and that in and of itself will affect the timeline.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, go ahead.

EUGENE DANIELS: But also, some of this is just about basing the fight, right?

So, one thing that's really interesting, and all of us know this from covering Donald Trump and his folks for so long, is that it's the thing that they're doing is not always the thing that they want everyone to be paying attention to.

And sometimes the underlying part of it is they just want his base to be -- stay riled up and understand that he wants -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That's why Canada, exactly.

EUGENE DANIELS: Exactly, to keep the fight.

But that is also a part of this, right?

So, whether or not he wants to take Canada and be the 51st state, or whether or not he really truly believes deeply that the 14th Amendment does not give people who are born here citizenship.

It is about the people within the party, and people in his base seeing him have the fight sometimes just for the fight's sake.

Fighting with the judges is also a part of that.

Not saying that he doesn't want to take it to the end of the line, but that fight is important to him and his team.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Let me spend a couple minutes talking about another dramatic action this week.

The president has made moves to shut down the Department of Education.

Admittedly, it's not a department founded in the late 1700, but it's a federal department starting in 1979 and the Carter administration.

What was his motivation?

David?

DAVID IGNATIUS: So, if you read the announcement, the order, he says We have an education crisis in America that our students are not performing up to world standards.

We need to fix that.

And so he's going to dismantle this bureaucracy, which he argues is obstructing performance.

You know, we do have an education crisis in America, but the Department of Education is not the reason.

It's a big, complicated cultural issue.

It deserves everybody's attention.

And, again, this is a distraction.

Education's getting too politicized as it is.

DAVID IGNATIUS: And this makes it even more so.

And I think that's really the sad part.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I want to read you what Jimmy Carter said when he established the department in 1979.

I don't know what history will show, but my guess is that the best move for the quality of life in America in the future might very well be the establishment of this new Department of Education.

Nancy, did it achieve what Jimmy Carter sought?

NANCY YOUSSEF: Well, let's talk about what it doesn't do.

It doesn't set curriculum.

It doesn't set graduation requirements.

It doesn't set enrollments.

What it ended up doing were things like student loans.

It ended up advocating for disabled students to be able to get an education.

And under the Trump administration, those responsibilities are going to be divvied out to other government organizations, small business administration for loans and HHS.

I think the challenge is what the -- that in divvying it up, while the federal government will still have a role, once it's not under one umbrella, which the Department of Education provided and have and carried that responsibility of really having an education-focus mandate on these issues, you risk that those issues will not be addressed as sufficiently and adequately as they were under the Department of Education.

HHS might have experience with dealing with meeting the needs of the disabled but it doesn't have the experience of making sure that disabled children have their needs met to make sure they get an equal education.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Michael?

MICHAEL SCHERER: There's another thing going on here.

There is -- it's a smaller part of Department of Education, but there's an $800 million think tank in the middle of it that does things like track the education performance of American students.

So, the reason we know -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: The reason we know we're doing badly -- MICHAEL SCHERER: Badly is (INAUDIBLE) education.

They train teachers, they do research.

They actually contribute to trying to improve things.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Where do they say it's going?

MICHAEL SCHERER: They haven't.

So, what the president has said is the final disposition of the Department of Education will have to go to Congress for, but it's not at all clear.

I mean, they're clearly reducing the Department of Education like there are other agencies.

But what becomes of those other parts of the Department of Education is still an open question.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Eugene, the people of America are not exactly rising up in defense of the Department of Education.

It's sort of an unloved department.

What are the politics here for the Democrats?

EUGENE DANIELS: Well, part of it is that people don't know -- they don't care what organizations or what departments are doing the things that impact their daily life.

They just want it to happen, right?

So, you go to someone and say, do you want the Department of Education to keep doing what it's doing?

They'll be like, I don't know.

But if you ask them, do you want to make sure there's equity in schools?

Do you want to make sure someone cares about disabled kids and what they're learning and what access they have in schools?

They'll say, yes, that's probably -- that's something that I want, right?

And so the lack of specificity in the conversation, I think, makes it easier for Republicans to do this.

And Donald Trump is not the first Republican that has promised or wanted to get rid of the Department of Education after it was created by Jimmy Carter.

Ronald Reagan ran on wanting to get rid of the Department of Education.

So this has been a long hail dream of the Republican Party.

But every single time, even when presidents talk to leaders in their party that were in Congress, the congressional leader said, no, we can't do that.

There's no votes for that.

And so there's still probably no votes for that.

And so what you're seeing is instead of Donald Trump going to Congress and saying, let's get rid of it, he's bleeding it out as much as he can.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

This is one more proof of the second term Trump tsunami approach, right.