Why Is the Weaponization Report So… Normal? - Lawfare
Title: One Emergency After Another
Source: Lawfare
Date of Publication: May 14, 2026
Author: Kate Gilbert. Gilbert was a Special Litigation Counsel and Acting Deputy Chief in the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. There, she prosecuted police misconduct, hate crimes, and other civil rights crimes. She joined the Department through the Attorney General’s Honors Program in 2015 after federal appellate clerkships. She graduated from the University of Michigan Law School.
Why we are recommending this article: In this recent essay for Lawfare, Kate Gilbert examines the U.S. Department of Justice’s first “Weaponization Working Group” report and argues that its significance lies less in its conclusions than in the bureaucratic form through which those conclusions are presented.
Rather than focusing solely on partisan conflict, the article explores how institutional procedures, investigative frameworks, professionalized language, and claims of administrative neutrality can normalize extraordinary assertions of political authority while preserving the appearance of ordinary governance. In doing so, the essay raises broader questions highly relevant to ISSE’s work, including how exceptional political logics become embedded within routine state practice and how mechanisms originally framed as corrective, temporary, or extraordinary can evolve into enduring features of institutional governance.
The article also intersects with contemporary debates surrounding Unitary Executive Theory, which is the constitutional theory that the president exercises broad and centralized authority over the executive branch and its personnel. While more conventional formulations of the theory emphasize total presidential control over executive agencies within existing constitutional structures, more expansive interpretations increasingly argue that many traditional constraints on presidential authority (including aspects of congressional oversight, civil service protections, independent agency autonomy, prosecutorial independence, and in some cases judicial interference in areas deemed core executive functions) are constitutionally suspect or incompatible with democratic accountability.
From the perspective of ISSE’s research, these developments raise important questions about how exceptionality increasingly operates not only through formally declared emergencies, but also through the gradual restructuring of bureaucratic authority, institutional loyalty, institutional guardrails, and executive governance within otherwise ordinary constitutional systems.
You can read the full article here.
