#judicary

Lisa Needham at Daily Kos:

In the last three weeks, Donald Trump has wreaked havoc on the American constitutional order. His actions have encroached on Congress' domain, and his administration is ignoring court orders. When the executive branch usurps the powers of the other two branches, that violates the separation of powers and creates the most stark constitutional crisis imaginable.   So why won’t anyone say it? Neither the mainstream media nor Democratic elected officials seem capable of calling this what it is. Instead, we have the surreal occurrence of media outlets accurately describing how the administration’s actions violate the Constitution, followed by vague hand-waving about how maybe that means a constitutional crisis will happen at some as-yet-undefined point in the future.  Take NBC News’ coverage of the Federal Emergency Management Agency continuing to freeze funding despite not one but two court orders telling them to knock it off. By any measure, the executive branch just straight-up ignoring the authority of the judicial branch is an actual factual constitutional crisis. 

But NBC twists itself in knots, framing the issue as one about federal employees being caught between Trump’s demands and court orders, saying those officials are “at the ground level of a potential constitutional crisis in which Trump is claiming expansive powers that test traditional limits on the president’s authority and could circumscribe the roles of Congress and the courts.” Besides the clunky hedging—what does it mean to be on the ground level of a potential crisis? Do crises have floors to ascend?—this is a wildly odd framing. It puts the onus for the crisis on the people carrying out Trump’s orders rather than Trump himself. It also frames Trump as chafing against some vague “traditional limits” because the piece is unwilling to speak plainly.  Other outlets hedge by misstating what is happening. On Wednesday, the Washington Post talked about the consequences of Trump ignoring court orders but framed that as something that is not yet occurring: “Should the Trump administration begin openly defying court orders, the country could be barreling toward a constitutional crisis, legal experts warn.”

The administration is already openly defying court orders. A court literally already said so, with John J. McConnell Jr., a federal judge in Rhode Island, ruling that the administration ignored his previous order and continued to freeze some federal funding.  Yes, other presidents have slow-walked implementations of court orders and have publicly complained about rulings, but that’s not what is going on here.  Imagine President Joe Biden, who routinely got kicked in the teeth by conservative courts, asserting that courts can’t tell him what to do and threatening the judges themselves.  That’s what Trump did on Tuesday, complaining that “it seems hard to believe that a judge could say, ‘We don’t want you to do that.’ So maybe we have to look at the judges. ‘Cause I think that’s a very serious violation.”  That’s been JD Vance’s stance for a while now, even before joining the Trump ticket. He believes the real constitutional crisis is when the Supreme Court steps in and tells the president he can’t do something. After Trump suffered a spate of adverse rulings, Vance took to X to gripe that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”  That’s a true statement in that it would be an overreach for the judicial branch to limit the executive branch’s legitimate authority. The issue here is that Trump and Vance don’t believe there are any limits on their authority and that only they define what is “legitimate.” They are so committed to that view that they won’t even respect court rulings that only temporarily pause their efforts while cases proceed.  [...] It all feels reminiscent of Trump’s first term, when the media went to comical lengths to avoid saying Trump was lying. Instead, we got things like “demonstrable falsehoods” and “over-broad boasts.” That persistent failure to grapple with the fact the president outright lied thousands of times, to call it what it was, is what got us here today.  The constitutional crisis we’re facing isn’t just about Trump running roughshod over separation of powers. It’s also about the fact that the courts lack adequate enforcement mechanisms when the president refuses to follow the law. 

America is in a Trump/Musk-fueled constitutional crisis.

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