Abstract
I. Introduction A visiting endowed academic lecture is, I suppose, part serious scholarship and part performance art. Professor Sandy Levinson's wide-ranging and engaging Sibley Lecture certainly has elements of both. 1 It touches on a number of fascinating and important issues. The quality of the discussion is lessened, however, by the lecture's conceded intermixture of partisan rant with more thoughtful academic reflection. The former aspects of "Constitutional Norms in a State of Permanent Emergency" are probably undeserving of extended comment in this venue (though I will have some thoughts on those aspects near the end of this comment). Because many of Levinson's remarks and asides are undeveloped, a full-scale rebuttal would end up being longer than the original product and take on some of the same unfocused quality, in a kind of "How Many Things Are Wrong with This Picture?" essay. I therefore, will pass over those many highly dubious points that are either un- argued throw-away lines expressing Levinson's political passions; 2 that embrace in passing flamboyant but vulnerable constitutional theories of others, collateral to the questions at hand; 3 that revisit Levinson's anger with Supreme Court decisions with which he vehemently disagrees (like Bush v. Gore); 4 or that assert, rather hysterically (and almost comically), that the administration of President George W. Bush is bent on establishing a dictatorship and is the most dangerous presidential administration in history. 5 Sandy Levinson gives such claims merely sidelong (if seriously distracting) glances on the way to what appears to ...