We are stuck between a rock and a hard place politically. The real decisions should be coming from Congress not the courts. However, Congress is too disorganized and disconnected to answer the important questions, leaving the courts to either muddle along or else become semi-dictatorial. In most countries, this would cause a constitutional crisis, but the modern U.S. system seems to be a little too resilient to such otherwise concerning signals.

We're far past a constitutional crisis, and the courts taking power nobody wanted to give to them (who wasn't interested in a unitary executive at least) isn't a good solution.

What constitutional crisis has occurred that hasn't been resolved?

Constitutional crises involve fundamental breaks in the working of government that bring two or more of its elements into direct conflict that can't be reconciled through the normal means. The last of these by my accounting was over desegregation, which was resolved with the President ordering the Army to force the recalcitrant states to comply. Before that was a showdown between the New Deal Congress and the Supreme Court, which the former won by credibly threatening to pack the latter (which is IMO a much less severe crisis but still more substantial than anything happening today). However, that was almost a century ago, and Congress has not been that coherent lately.

I would think the latest one where SCOTUS ruled that the president was a king except in matters where the SCOTUS decides they aren't counts as a constitutional crisis.

Constitutional crises are not a matter of opinion but of occurrence, arising from an actual power conflict between arms of the government that is caused by a conflicted reading of the constitutional text. Basically, if the system just ticks on, it's not a constitutional crisis.

If "I think this is a very bad decision" was cause for a constitutional crisis, any state with more than three digit population would be in constitutional crisis perpetually.

> Constitutional crises are not a matter of opinion but of occurrence, arising from an actual power conflict between arms of the government that is caused by a conflicted reading of the constitutional text. Basically, if the system just ticks on, it's not a constitutional crisis.

This happened as recently as 2021-01-06; strong evidence that the military subverted the president to call the National Guard into Washington DC and secure the electoral count.

If Trump didn't back down it could have definitely been a constitutional crisis.

I'd say it was narrowly averted though.

That's close. Both the excessively long lame duck period (2 months for Congress and 2.5 months for the President) and disunity between the President and the rest of the executive branch have also been fodder for crises in the past (Marbury v Madison, Andrew Johnson's impeachment).