During this Constitution Week, members of Congress traded sharp words with presidential loyalists over the stonewalling of a House committee's legal inquiries.

In the meantime, a presidential push to suppress California's separate air regulations underscored a historic role reversal in which progressives now invoke the constitutional rights of states.

Also, the Trump administration publicized plans to raid $3.6 billion in military funds for a border wall that lawmakers declined to fund in their formal budgetary role.

So you may say the Constitution is having a rough Constitution Week a commemoration begun in 1955 at the behest of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Apart from whether he's read it by now, flag-hugging President Donald Trump makes no effort to get the public to revere the founding document he's sworn to uphold.

If anything he treats it blithely.

Last week, Trump joked at a rally that he'd still be in office in 2026, when the United States co-hosts the World Cup. The 22nd Amendment bars him from the third term this would require.

Birthright citizenship is enshrined in the 14th Amendment. To no effect, Trump has said the right could be taken away without a constitutional amendment. Nobody in his entourage makes a supporting case.

Go ahead and bump some MS-13 suspects' heads on cars, he once joked to police gathered on Long Island.

Reasonable searches per the Fourth Amendment? Trump pardoned a former Arizona sheriff who defied federal court orders to stop abusing his office in pursuit of people in the country illegally.

Trump said falsely that Democrats would kill the Second Amendment. They can't: Constitutional changes require a rigorous congressional process and must be ratified by three quarters of the states.

Trump's professed ignorance, or cynicism, apparently goes deeper. In July, he dropped this gem: "I have an Article 2 where I have the right to do whatever I want as president."

Wrong. That article prescribes executive powers, but Articles I and III empower the Congress and the judiciary, offsetting his ability to "do whatever" he wants.

Not that the Trump camp creates all the constitutional conflagration. Far from it.

Marginal Democratic presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke drew criticism in the name of the Second Amendment when he emotionally declared in the last debate: "Hell, yes, were going to take your AR-15, your AK-47. Were not going to allow it to be used against our fellow Americans anymore."

Until 2004, the U.S. Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 barred the manufacture for civilians of specified semiautomatic firearms and certain large-capacity magazines.

The law survived court challenges, but Congress declined to renew it.

Some Democrats are talking about abolishing the Electoral College that put Trump in the presidency even though he lost the popular vote. That, too, could not skirt a rigorous ratification process.

The highest-stakes constitutional embroilment is the Trump administration's efforts to finesse or crush hostile inquiries from the Democratic-controlled House. These could lead to impeachment, possibly for obstruction of justice in the Russia probe.

As a practical matter, it remains to be seen whether and for how long the White House can keep key Trump allies who factored in the Mueller probe from testifying as requested before the Judiciary Committee.

Will the Constitution, signed this week in 1787, prevail? That's a perennial question.

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Janison: One rough week for the Constitution - Newsday