He’s essentially the most lawless president in American historical past.
As Donald Trump’s law-breaking continues, America’s final protection is the federal courts.
However the huge story right here (which hasn’t obtained practically the eye it deserves) is that the Trump-Vance-Musk regime is ignoring the courts.
On Sunday, JD Vance declared that “judges aren’t allowed to regulate the chief’s professional energy”.
That is bonkers. In our system of presidency, it’s as much as the courts to find out whether or not the president is utilizing his energy “legitimately”, not the president.
Contemplate Trump’s freeze on all federal spending. Article I, part 8 of the structure offers Congress the ability to acceptable cash, not the president.
Thus far, two federal judges have ordered Trump’s freeze on spending stopped, pending full hearings on the lawsuits. However Trump is ignoring these courtroom selections and continues to freeze funds Congress has appropriated.
The White Home press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, says the freeze will proceed although Trump’s Workplace of Administration and Price range (OMB) has withdrawn the memo implementing it.
In the present day, federal choose John L McConnell Jr ordered the Trump administration to adjust to what he referred to as “the plain textual content” of an edict he issued final month to launch billions of {dollars} in federal grants.
It’s the primary time a choose has expressly declared that the Trump White Home is disobeying a judicial mandate.
Final week, US district choose AliKhan reprimanded the OMB for disregarding the same order.
It seems that OMB sought to beat a judicially imposed impediment with out really ceasing the challenged conduct. The courtroom can consider few issues extra disingenuous.”
On Saturday, federal district courtroom choose Paul A Engelmayer briefly denied Musk’s younger recruits entry to the treasury’s cost and knowledge techniques, discovering a danger of “irreparable hurt.” The choose ordered anybody who had been granted entry to the techniques since January 20 to “destroy any and all copies of fabric downloaded” from it.
One other federal choose, John Coughenour, has blocked Trump’s govt order altering birthright citizenship, calling it “clearly unconstitutional”. The choose didn’t pull any punches:
It has grow to be ever extra obvious that, to our president, the rule of regulation is however an obstacle to his coverage targets. The rule of regulation is, based on him, one thing to navigate round or just ignore, whether or not that be for political or private achieve.”
In the meantime, in a lawsuit filed Friday, a number of “sanctuary” cities and counties are difficult each Trump’s govt order withdrawing federal funds from locations that refuse to assist perform his immigration agenda and his justice division’s menace to prosecute any jurisdiction that refuses to conform.
Plaintiffs are searching for to “examine this abuse of energy” by asking the courts to declare the Trump regime’s actions illegal and stop their enforcement.
The regulation is clearly on the plaintiff’s facet. The supreme courtroom has repeatedly held that the federal authorities can not power cities and states to undertake legal guidelines or to implement federal mandates.
However Trump isn’t budging.
Over the following months, these and dozens of different federal instances shall be appealed to the supreme courtroom – both by the plaintiffs arguing that Trump is ignoring lower-court selections, or by Trump’s justice division interesting these selections.
Then what?
You’ve got each motive to be cynical concerning the present majority on the supreme courtroom. However the instances I’ve simply cited, together with many others, are primarily based on the supreme courtroom’s personal precedents that say that Trump can not legally do what he’s doing.
The Roberts courtroom has proven itself keen to reverse its prior opinions (see: Roe v Wade), however my betting is that at the least on a few of these points the excessive courtroom will rule in opposition to Trump.
All of which raises a last, perilous query: What if the Trump regime ignores the supreme courtroom simply because it has ignored decrease courts?
In his 2024 year-end report on the federal judiciary, Chief Justice John Roberts anticipated this risk, noting that judicial independence “is undermined except the opposite branches [of government] are agency of their accountability to implement the courtroom’s decrees.”
Roberts talked about defiance by southern governors of the supreme courtroom’s 1954 ruling in Brown v Board of Training. Their defiance required that federal troops implement the supreme courtroom’s determination.
Roberts then commented on newer defiance:
Inside the previous few years … elected officers from throughout the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal courtroom rulings. These harmful options, nevertheless sporadic, should be soundly rejected.
There’s no secret whom Roberts was referring to. His first initials are JD and he must know higher. Vance graduated Yale Legislation College Class of 2013, and his spouse, Usha, clerked for Roberts from 2017 to 2018.
But Vance stated on a 2021 podcast: “When the courts cease you, stand earlier than the nation like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him implement it.’”
Right here’s Vance in a February 2024 interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos:
Vance: “The president has to have the ability to run the federal government as he thinks he ought to. That’s the best way the Structure works. It has been thwarted an excessive amount of by the best way our paperwork has labored over the previous 15 years.”
Stephanopoulos: “The structure additionally says the president should abide by professional Supreme Court docket rulings, doesn’t it?”
Vance: “The structure says that the supreme courtroom could make rulings, but when the supreme courtroom – and, look, I hope that they’d not do that – but when the supreme courtroom stated the president of the USA can’t hearth a normal, that might be an illegitimate ruling, and the president has to have Article II prerogative beneath the structure to truly run the navy as he sees match.”
In different phrases, if the US supreme courtroom guidelines in opposition to Trump on an vital challenge, there’s a good likelihood the Trump-Vance-Musk regime will thumb their nostril at it.
What then? Impeachment isn’t a risk as a result of Republicans run each chambers of Congress and haven’t precisely distinguished themselves with integrity or independence.
If Trump merely ignores the excessive courtroom, is that the tip of regulation?
-
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public coverage on the College of California, Berkeley, and the writer of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Frequent Good. His latest guide, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Repair It, is out now. He’s a Guardian US columnist. His publication is at robertreich.substack.com
Supply hyperlink
