Return to First Solutions: Extra-Constitutional Remedies

What Lloyd Cutler (1980, 126–127) describes as the “inability to form a government,” E. E. Schattschneider (1948, 3) calls a “failure to mobilize the power of the nation to govern itself.” Both are exemplified by the American government’s handling of one of the most devastating crises of the early twenty-first century, the pandemic. The first confirmed case of Coronavirus (Covid-19) was reported in the U.S. in late January 2020, within eight months the U.S. had surpassed the world in the number of reported cases (more than five million, eight hundred thousand) and deaths (more than one hundred eighty thousand) (CDC 2020). It was the worst pandemic to hit the nation in more than one hundred years and as of mid-2020, with no vaccine or other forms of relief on the horizon, it promised to continue to have a debilitating impact on everything from health, safety, and security to education, work, and the economy.