Legally, Again

Americans often associate Weimar Germany with violent brownshirts in the streets forcing their radical leader into power. The brownshirts were real. The story of how power was taken is wrong.

Most see a desperate country, a mob in uniform, a charismatic radical riding the disorder into power. The actual picture is closer to a boardroom deal than a riot. By late 1932 the radical's party was losing votes and running out of money. In the November Reichstag election they finished with only 33 percent of the vote. They were still the largest single party in parliament, and no government could be formed without them. Goebbels wrote in his diary that the party was finished. The street violence was already there, but it had not been enough.

What had been enough, and what most people don't know, was a private decision made by a small group of rich, conservative men who thought they could manage a radical from above.

The radical had learned the lesson of the failed 1923 Munich putsch in prison, where he concluded that the next attempt would proceed legally, "though we have to hold our noses."[1] The party rebuilt around elections, not insurrection. By 1932 the SA was still in the streets, but it was a party instrument, not a substitute for the party. The decisive instrument was the constitutional one.

Paul von Hindenburg, the eighty-five-year-old president, did not want the radical as chancellor. He had said so publicly. Franz von Papen, a conservative aristocrat who had been chancellor briefly the year before and lost the job, persuaded him otherwise. Papen's argument was that the radical could be contained inside a cabinet of conservatives. Papen himself would be vice-chancellor. Only three members of the radical's party would sit in the cabinet. The man would be hemmed in by experienced ones. The country would get a stable right-wing government and the radical's party would absorb the responsibility for unpopular decisions.

On January 30, 1933, Hindenburg signed. The radical became chancellor under the constitution, by appointment, with conservative party support.

The army stood aside. The industrialists who had been funding the right through the Industrie-Klub and similar channels found the new arrangement acceptable; some had been quietly funding the radical's party themselves. The conservative press treated the appointment as a routine cabinet shift.

On the night of February 27, 1933, the parliament building burned. A young Dutch communist was found at the scene and blamed. The next morning Hindenburg signed an emergency decree under Article 48 of the constitution that suspended freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and protection from arbitrary arrest. The decree was never lifted. Mass arrests of Communist deputies and trade-union leaders began the same day.

The left did not stand together. The Communist International had ruled since 1928 that the Social Democrats were "social fascists," that is, the main enemy of the working class. Communist street fighters and Social Democratic ones killed each other in the streets during the 1931 and 1932 election campaigns instead of standing against the common opponent. By the time the Enabling Act came to the floor on March 23, 1933, the Communist deputies were either in custody or in hiding. The Act, in four short paragraphs, gave the cabinet the power to make laws without parliamentary consent for the next four years, including laws that contradicted the constitution itself. The Social Democrats voted against it. The Catholic Center voted for it. The two-thirds majority required to amend the constitution was assembled out of the conservative parties, the Center, and the radical's party. It passed 444 to 94.[2]

The SA violence that most people remember as the engine of the takeover came after this. The first concentration camp opened at Dachau the day before the Enabling Act vote. The trade unions were dissolved on May 2. The other parties were banned by mid-July. The worst of the SA was discarded by the regime itself in the Night of the Long Knives a year later, once the instrument had served its purpose.

The mechanism, told plainly, was not a mob breaking down a door. It was a handshake.

Viktor Orbán's Fidesz party won the 2010 Hungarian election with 53 percent of the vote. The electoral system converted that share into 68 percent of the seats, and the 1989 constitution could be amended by a two-thirds majority. The supermajority meant the constitution could be rewritten by ordinary legislative vote.

It was. A new Fundamental Law was drafted by a small Fidesz committee, passed in April 2011, and entered into force in January 2012. No referendum. From there the mechanism ran through every institution that could have checked it. The Constitutional Court was packed and its jurisdiction over budget law narrowed. Public broadcasting was brought under state control, and private outlets were bought or defunded until, in 2018, more than four hundred were merged into a single government-aligned foundation. Parliament was shrunk and the districts redrawn to turn pluralities into supermajorities. Foreign-funded NGOs were forced to register as such, Central European University was pushed out of Budapest, and migration work was criminalized.[3]

No Enabling Act was needed. The constitution was not suspended; it was rewritten. The courts were not abolished; they were packed. The press was not banned; it was bought. Fidesz won 45, then 49, then 54 percent across the next three elections and held its two-thirds through all of them.

For fifteen years it looked permanent.

Then a defection. In February 2024, Péter Magyar, the ex-husband of Orbán's justice minister, resigned his government posts and called the regime's project a "political product" that covered corruption and transfers of wealth. He had been inside. He took over the dormant Tisza Party, built an opposition from nothing, and finished second in that year's European Parliament election. Fidesz redrew the districts again in December 2024 to force Tisza to win the national vote by three to five points just to take a parliamentary majority.[4]

On April 12, 2026, Tisza won 141 of 199 seats with 3.3 million votes, the most any Hungarian party has ever received. The two-thirds Orbán had used to rewrite the Fundamental Law in 2011 now belonged to Magyar. Orbán conceded after sixteen years.[5]

But Orbán's people are still in place. They hold the Constitutional Court, the prosecutor's office, the media authority, and the audit board, most of them on fixed terms written to outlast any single government. A two-thirds majority can rewrite the Fundamental Law on paper. It cannot vote those people out of their chairs. Whether Magyar can undo the machine, or has only moved into it, is unknown six weeks after the win.[6]

The American story runs through two presidencies separated by four years.

On January 6, 2021, a crowd assembled by the losing president attempted to stop the certification of the election he had lost. The Capitol was breached. The certification was delayed for hours but then completed. The transfer of power followed.

He returned in 2024 as his party's nominee and won the popular vote. He took the oath on January 20, 2025, by appointment of the voters, under the constitution. On his first day back in office, he pardoned roughly fifteen hundred people who had been convicted in connection with the events of January 6, including the leaders of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. The radical of 1923 had said in prison that the next attempt would proceed legally, though they had to hold their noses. The candidate of 2024 reached the same conclusion. He proceeded electorally and won.[7]

The change began in his first term and accelerated in his second.

During his first term he appointed three justices to the Supreme Court and 231 judges to the federal courts below it. The Supreme Court that resulted has a six-to-three conservative majority. On July 1, 2024, between his loss of the office and his return to it, that court ruled that a president holds absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for the exercise of core constitutional powers and presumptive immunity for other official acts.[8] He returned to a presidency the court he had built had legally enlarged in his absence. The Hungarian Constitutional Tribunal was packed before the new Fundamental Law was written. The American Supreme Court was packed before the immunity ruling was issued. The instrument is shaped before it is needed.

An executive order signed on inauguration day reinstated Schedule F under a new name, Schedule Policy/Career. The order allowed the reclassification of roughly fifty thousand career federal employees in policy-influencing positions as at-will. Failure to faithfully implement administration policies became grounds for dismissal. A separate order established the Department of Government Efficiency, an entity outside the statutory civil service, and authorized it to identify positions and personnel for removal. On the night of January 24, seventeen inspectors general were fired by email in a single hour, citing changing priorities. The thirty-day congressional notice required by law was not given. A federal judge later ruled the firings unlawful and declined to reinstate the officials. USAID was effectively dismantled in February. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was ordered to stop work.[9]

In December 2024 and July 2025, ABC News and Paramount Global, the parent of CBS, settled defamation suits brought by the returning president by paying $15 million and $16 million respectively into a foundation for his future library. Paramount was seeking federal approval for an $8 billion merger with Skydance Media at the time. The FCC, chaired by an appointee of the new president, had opened an investigation into the same CBS broadcast. Stephen Colbert called the Paramount settlement a "big fat bribe" on his CBS late-night program; three days later, CBS announced his show would end. The FCC approved the merger on July 24, 2025; the deal closed August 7. The new controlling owner is David Ellison, son of a major financial backer of the new president. In September, the FCC chair publicly told ABC affiliates they could suspend Jimmy Kimmel "the easy way or the hard way"; ABC suspended him within hours. In October, Paramount Skydance acquired The Free Press, an online publication founded by the opinion journalist Bari Weiss, for $150 million; Weiss was named editor-in-chief of CBS News. Congress rescinded the $1.1 billion previously appropriated to public broadcasting in July; the Corporation for Public Broadcasting wound down on September 30. In Hungary, the consolidation of media under regime-aligned ownership took a decade. In the United States, controlling ownership of one major news network changed hands in less than a year, conditioned on payment from the network to the president and approval from a regulator he had appointed.[10]

In February and March 2025, the administration issued executive orders against five law firms: Perkins Coie, Paul Weiss, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey. The orders stripped the firms' attorneys of security clearances, terminated their federal contracts, and restricted their access to federal buildings. The orders cited the firms' representation of clients adverse to the president or their employment of attorneys who had investigated him. Paul Weiss settled on March 21 by committing $40 million in pro bono work for administration causes. Eight other major firms followed with similar agreements over the next eight weeks; total committed pro bono value reached approximately $1 billion. Four firms refused and sued. Federal judges struck down each of the executive orders against them as unconstitutional retaliation against protected speech.[11]

Beginning March 7, 2025, the administration froze federal research funding to universities, citing a Task Force on Combatting Antisemitism: $400 million at Columbia, $510 million at Brown, $790 million at Northwestern, over $1 billion at Cornell, $2.2 billion at Harvard. Conditions for restoration extended beyond antisemitism to governance, hiring, admissions, curriculum, and academic department oversight. Four of the named universities settled. Harvard sued and won; a federal judge ruled in September 2025 that the freeze had been unconstitutional retaliation. The administration appealed.[12]

The 2017 Hungarian higher education amendment was written to push one institution out of Budapest. The American version reached the senior tier of the legal profession and the leading research universities in less than a year. The mechanism worked by forcing each institution to choose between capitulation and litigation.

State power was also moving in the other direction. On May 18, 2026, the Justice Department announced an Anti-Weaponization Fund of $1.776 billion, drawn from the federal Judgment Fund, to compensate people the administration designated as victims of "lawfare and weaponization" under the previous administration. The fund came out of the settlement of a lawsuit the president had brought against the Internal Revenue Service over the 2020 leak of his tax returns. The Acting Attorney General who negotiated it had previously served as the president's personal defense lawyer, and the president dismissed his own lawsuit before a federal judge could review the terms. Under pressure from congressional Republicans, the fund was abandoned; on June 2 the Acting Attorney General told the House the department would not move forward with it. What survived was the part that was never meant to be public. The same settlement bars the IRS from pursuing the president, his family, and his businesses over past tax years, an audit shield quietly attached to the agreement and left in place after the fund was dropped, likely sparing him on the order of a hundred million dollars in taxes and penalties.[13]

On January 20, 2025, the chief executives of the largest American technology companies were seated in the Capitol Rotunda, ahead of the incoming cabinet. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, and Tim Cook sat behind the president's family. Most of their companies had given $1 million each to the inaugural fund. Musk had given approximately $290 million to the 2024 campaign and now ran the Department of Government Efficiency from inside the administration. In the weeks before the inauguration, Meta had ended its third-party fact-checking program.[14]

The Senate, controlled by the president's party, confirmed the nominees the administration sent forward. Pete Hegseth, a former cable television host with no defense experience and allegations of sexual misconduct and alcohol abuse against him, was confirmed as Secretary of Defense on January 24 by a tie-breaking vote from the vice president. Three Republican senators broke ranks; the rest did not. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Tulsi Gabbard was confirmed as Director of National Intelligence. In late February, the president fired Air Force General C.Q. Brown Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with more than two and a half years remaining in his four-year statutory term. The Secretary of Defense then fired the chief of naval operations, the vice chief of the Air Force, and the judge advocates general of the military services.[15]

No Enabling Act was needed. No new constitution was written. The instrument was the executive order, signed in volume on the first day and many days after. The cover was the Supreme Court that had already ruled the president immune for official acts in 2024. Lower courts struck down some orders. That is a real difference from 1933; the German courts never resisted. The administration appealed. The orders did their work while the appeals proceeded.

Two countries have tried to vote the mechanism out after it consolidated. Hungary opened that door six weeks ago. Poland opened it in October 2023 and has been working on what is behind it ever since.

In 2015 Law and Justice won a parliamentary majority and Andrzej Duda took the presidency. Over the next eight years the party ran the same playbook: it packed the Constitutional Tribunal, gave the justice minister power over the lower courts, lowered the retirement age to push out sitting judges, turned the state broadcaster into a party organ, and squeezed independent outlets while a state-controlled oil firm bought the largest regional newspaper chain. Districts were redrawn. Eight years of building.

In October 2023, PiS lost. A three-party opposition coalition won a majority on 74 percent turnout. PiS still finished first as a single party; the seat math made that not enough. The election was held, the vote was counted, the result was honored. Donald Tusk returned as prime minister.[16]

Then the limit showed. Tusk's government untangled the state media within a year, but the judicial captures did not come undone. The Constitutional Tribunal stayed stacked with PiS appointees, the Supreme Court stayed stacked, the lower courts kept their PiS-era judges. And in June 2025 the presidency swung back: Karol Nawrocki, backed by Law and Justice, won the runoff and was sworn in that August. He has used the veto to block Tusk's judicial reforms and submitted a counter-bill that would imprison officials for up to five years, or up to ten if they acted for personal gain, for persistently questioning the powers of the president or the courts.[17]

Two and a half years in and the captured institutions are still there. The veto power is back in the hands of the people who built it.

An election removes the tenant. It does not dismantle the building. Judicial appointments outlast the cabinet that made them. The captured districts stay. State media can be untangled, with effort, in the year before the next presidential election; that is the one piece of the building that has come back. The rest waits on legislation, and legislation waits on a signature from the office that may have swung back the other way. The building is the durable thing.

The American version is the same, on a larger scale and a longer timeline. The Polish captures were built in eight years. The framework to change the American system has been under construction since 1971, when Lewis Powell wrote his confidential memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce arguing that business needed to build a sustained, conservative counter-establishment across universities, courts, media, and politics.[18] The funder class took the assignment. The Business Roundtable went up in 1972. Heritage in 1973. The American Legislative Exchange Council the same year. Cato in 1977. The Federalist Society in 1982. The State Policy Network in 1992. The Mandate for Leadership policy series began with the Reagan transition in 1981. Project 2025 is the latest installment. I have written elsewhere about what that fifty-year project produced economically and rhetorically.[19]

The judicial layer is what the longer timeline buys. The Federalist Society has been running its pipeline since 1982. It fed three Supreme Court justices and 231 federal judges into the first term. The path of those three Supreme Court justices was cleared by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. In 2016, McConnell refused for 293 days to consider President Obama's nominee Merrick Garland for the Scalia seat, on the principle that election-year nominations should wait for the next president. In September 2020, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died with seven weeks until the election, McConnell rushed Amy Coney Barrett through in thirty days, eight days before the vote, in open contradiction of the principle he had cited four years earlier.[20] The principle was the seat. In 2024, the Supreme Court handed down the immunity ruling. It protects the office the returning president was about to reoccupy. The Court that issued it was built before the case was filed. The pipeline that built the Court has been running since Reagan. The administration is the tenant. The building has been under construction since Nixon.

I grew up in the country that was built against another Weimar. The Basic Law of 1949 was written by people who had watched the mechanism work the first time and would not trust it not to work again. They put the core protections beyond the reach of ordinary majorities. The basic rights of the Grundgesetz cannot be amended away even by a two-thirds vote. The federal republic and the principle of the social state are entrenched against amendment. Drittwirkung extends those rights into private relationships, so they bind employers and not only the state. Codetermination seats worker representatives on the boards of large companies by law.[21] I have written elsewhere about how the labor side of that system works.[19] The political and judicial side does the same kind of work. It binds across turnover. An administration that wanted to dismantle it could not do so by executive order, by a packed court, or by the kind of majority that elected it.

That is the part I used to think was the answer. It is not the whole of it. Structure assumes honoring too. Weimar had a constitution, and its Article 76 required a two-thirds vote to amend it, and the Enabling Act met the bar.[22] The entrenchment did not save the republic, because the men operating it had already stopped honoring it. The German protection was never the paper alone. It was the paper and a country that, having watched the paper fail once, decided to honor the next one. America took a different road. Its constitution is solid and thin on entrenchment, with no eternity clause and no horizontal rights, and it leaned on a norm of honoring to do the work the German structure does. While the norm holds, the missing backstop is invisible. When the norm goes, there is nothing under it.

And the German road is not finished proving itself either. As I write this, the Alternative für Deutschland, the extremist right-wing party in the Bundestag, is polling far ahead in this year's eastern state elections, within reach of an outright majority in Saxony-Anhalt, in the country built to stop exactly that. State power there is real. The Länder run the police, the schools, and the broadcasters, they fill seats on state courts, and they sit in the Bundesrat, where they can block federal law. The firewall that kept the party out of government is cracking.[23] The structure raised the cost and bought time. It did not make the country immune. Even there, in the place that encoded the lessons hardest, the honoring is starting to give.

The American structure is older than either, denser than either, built by people whose names are not on a ballot, and resting on the same norm of honoring that is now disappearing.

The brownshirts were never the mechanism. The mechanism is legal, and patient, and the same in each place, separated only by where each country stands on the clock. An election can change the tenant. Whether a new tenant can renovate the house is unsettled in Warsaw, unsettled in Budapest six weeks after the win, and unsettled even in the country built to be safe from it. Here the question has not been asked yet. The election that would ask it comes in 2028. A constitution, however solid, holds only while the people running it consent to be held by it. That is the variable. It is still live.

Sources

[1] Kurt G. W. Lüdecke, I Knew Hitler (1937), recounting Hitler's statement at Landsberg that the next attempt would proceed legally. https://www.famous-trials.com/hitler/2515-hitler-s-remarks-in-and-about-prison

[2] On the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act (vote 444 to 94), United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "The Enabling Act of 1933," https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-enabling-act ; on the Comintern "social fascism" line and the lethal KPD–SPD split, Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (2003).

[3] Venice Commission, Opinion CDL-AD(2011)016 on Hungary's Fundamental Law, https://www.venice.coe.int/webforms/documents/?pdf=CDL-AD(2011)016-e ; on the 2018 KESMA media merger, Reuters, https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1OE1JF ; on Central European University, Court of Justice of the EU, Case C-66/18, https://curia.europa.eu/juris/liste.jsf?num=C-66/18

[4] On Péter Magyar's break with the government and the Tisza Party, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A9ter_Magyar and The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/he-exposed-corruption-and-walked-across-hungary-now-peter-magyar-has-defeated-a-powerful-state-machine-280455 ; on the December 2024 constituency redraw, Venice Commission Opinion CDL-AD(2025)018, https://www.venice.coe.int/webforms/documents/default.aspx?pdffile=CDL-AD(2025)018-e

[5] 2026 Hungarian parliamentary election, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Hungarian_parliamentary_election ; Al Jazeera, "Peter Magyar wins Hungary election, unseating Viktor Orban after 16 years," https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/12/hungary-election-early-results-show-magyars-tisza-ahead-of-orbans-fidesz

[6] On the long fixed terms of the Constitutional Court, the prosecutor general, the Media Council, and the State Audit Office, Venice Commission opinions on the Fundamental Law and cardinal acts, CDL-AD(2011)016, https://www.venice.coe.int/webforms/documents/?pdf=CDL-AD(2011)016-e

[7] On the 2024 result and the second inauguration, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_inauguration_of_Donald_Trump ; on the January 6 pardons, NPR, https://www.npr.org/2025/01/20/g-s1-36809/trump-pardons-january-6-riot

[8] Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. ___ (2024), https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf ; on the first-term judicial appointments, Ballotpedia, https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_judicial_appointments_by_president

[9] Executive Order 14171, "Restoring Accountability to Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce," https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/restoring-accountability-to-policy-influencing-positions-within-the-federal-workforce/ ; on the inspector general firings, Federal News Network, https://federalnewsnetwork.com/agency-oversight/2025/09/trump-unlawfully-fired-17-agency-igs-judge-finds-but-wont-reinstate-them/ ; on USAID, KFF, https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/u-s-foreign-aid-freeze-dissolution-of-usaid-timeline-of-events/ ; on the CFPB, PBS NewsHour, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/vought-orders-cfpb-to-stop-investigations-and-suspend-new-rules-from-taking-effect

[10] ABC settlement, NPR, https://www.npr.org/2024/12/16/nx-s1-5230274/abc-settles-with-trump-for-15-million ; Paramount settlement, PBS, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/paramount-will-pay-16-million-to-settle-trump-lawsuit-over-60-minutes-interview-with-harris ; FCC approval of the Skydance merger, CNN, https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/24/media/fcc-skydance-paramount-merger-approved ; Kimmel suspension, CNN, https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/18/media/brendan-carr-jimmy-kimmel-fcc-first-amendment ; Free Press acquisition, CNBC, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/06/paramount-skydance-to-acquire-bari-weiss-founded-free-press.html ; CPB wind-down, NPR, https://www.npr.org/2025/08/01/nx-s1-5489808/cpb-shut-down-public-broadcasting-trump

[11] On the executive orders against law firms and the settlements, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeting_of_law_firms_and_lawyers_under_the_second_Trump_administration ; CBS News on Paul Weiss, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/paul-weiss-executive-order-rescinded-white-house-trump/

[12] On the university funding freezes, Time, https://time.com/7278236/university-funding-trump-harvard-cornell-northwestern-brown-princeton-penn-columbia/ ; on the Harvard ruling, NPR, https://www.npr.org/2025/09/03/nx-s1-5527314/trump-harvard-court-ruling-funding-boston

[13] Department of Justice announcement of the Anti-Weaponization Fund, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-anti-weaponization-fund ; on the fund's abandonment and the surviving IRS audit shield, CNN, https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/02/politics/blanche-house-testimony-trump-fund-takeaways and CNBC, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/02/doj-fund-trump-todd-blanche.html ; on the IRS settlement and the roughly $100 million at stake, NPR, https://www.npr.org/2026/05/19/g-s1-122938/irs-trump-settlement-tax-returns-audit

[14] On the inauguration seating and the corporate inaugural gifts, CBS News, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-tech-ceos-meta-amazon-donate-millions-inauguration/ ; on Musk's 2024 spending, CNN, https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/01/politics/elon-musk-2024-election-spending-millions

[15] Hegseth confirmation, CBS News, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pete-hegseth-confirmation-vote-senate-defense-secretary/ ; on the firing of Gen. C.Q. Brown and other senior officers, NPR, https://www.npr.org/2025/02/21/nx-s1-5305288/trump-fires-chairman-joint-chiefs-of-staff-charles-brown-pentagon

[16] 2023 Polish parliamentary election, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Polish_parliamentary_election ; Euronews on the result, https://www.euronews.com/2023/10/17/final-results-show-scale-of-pro-eu-opposition-victory-in-poland

[17] 2025 Polish presidential election, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Polish_presidential_election ; on the February 2026 veto and counter-bill, Notes from Poland, https://notesfrompoland.com/2026/02/22/polish-president-proposes-law-jailing-officials-who-question-his-powers/ ; on the criminal investigation of presidential advisers, https://notesfrompoland.com/2026/04/14/polish-justice-minister-orders-criminal-investigation-into-presidential-advisors-over-judge-dispute/

[18] The Lewis F. Powell Jr. Memorandum (1971), "Attack on American Free Enterprise System," https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/

[19] Werner Glinka, "That's Just How It Is," May 2026. https://wernerglinka.substack.com/p/thats-just-how-it-is

[20] On the 2016 blockade of the Garland nomination and the 2020 Barrett confirmation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrick_Garland_Supreme_Court_nomination

[21] Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, Article 79(3), the "eternity clause," https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.html ; on codetermination, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany

[22] Weimar Constitution, Article 76 (amendment by a two-thirds vote), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Constitution ; on the Enabling Act meeting that threshold, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-enabling-act

[23] On AfD polling in the 2026 Saxony-Anhalt election, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Saxony-Anhalt_state_election ; on the Länder and the Bundesrat's blocking role, https://www.bundesrat.de/EN/funktionen-en/gesetzgebung-en/gesetzgebung-en-node.html ; on the "firewall," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_against_the_far-right_in_Germany