Oh, marvelous me!
Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern sum up where we stand only eight weeks into American Carnage 2.0 — The Return of the King.
The pair summarize for Slate the multiple examples of the administration asserting its supremacy over the judicial branch just over the last week: the Lebanese doctor from Brown University, the 250 Venezuelan migrants, the Monday hearing in which DOJ lawyers refused to present evidence that they did not deliberately defy another court order they unilaterally deemed not “lawful.”
The Trump administration’s position seems to be that “all judicial rulings are merely advisory, or just suggestions, and the three coequal branches of government have been replaced by an elected monarch.” Except for the elected part. Trump and his hangers-on have no real use for elections unless they validate his manliness.
Lithwick and Stern write:
Trump capped off this weekend of lawlessness by announcing, in the early hours of Monday morning, that Biden’s preemptive pardons for Jan. 6 committee members are “void” because they were allegedly signed by autopen. This declaration rejects well-known, long-standing guidance from the Office of Legal Counsel (which the Justice Department has not yet withdrawn), and seems to be based on a conspiracy theory promoted by the Heritage Foundation. The reason these facially absurd autopen claims are so vitally important to the emerging theory of the imperial presidency is that they reveal precisely how cynical Trump’s view of boundless presidential power really is. These novel assertions of authority are not statements about presidential powers, but rather statements about Trump’s powers, which clearly apply to no other president. And the fact that DOJ lawyers are comfortable standing up before both federal judges and the American people to claim that Trump’s constitutional authority is without limit—whereas Biden’s was part of some ongoing criminal conspiracy and wholly illusory—shores up the notion that none of these claims attach to the office of the president, but that they inhere in fact in the person of Donald J. Trump.
For those folks who have been waiting to climb the pole and ring the “constitutional crisis” bell, it would appear we have arrived. Neither Judge Sorokin nor Judge Boasberg believed that he was signing a meaningless order, and both judges demanded compliance that never came. We are long past the point at which courts have any reason to believe Trump’s lawyers when they use rhetorical tricks and deliberate misdirection to suggest that judicial orders were ambiguous or that compliance is inadvertently delayed in good faith. We are now at the place, only eight weeks into this presidency, at which judges must decide if they will take the necessary steps to enforce their decisions, including sanctions and contempt, or if they will agree to be made irrelevant. Those are the remaining options. And if the courts surrender now, the people will lose their last line of defense against an administration that wields Article II like a cheat code to subvert democracy.
Trump will of course appeal any adverse rulings all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and expect his SCOTUS majority to support his kingship. “The best support,” Lithwick and Stern explain, “comes from a solo 2015 opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas that even Justice Antonin Scalia ridiculed as promoting ‘a presidency more reminiscent of George III than George Washington.’ ”
Thus, I would not say Trump is destined to be disappointed by SCOTUS. These days the court majority has found ways to get around disappointing him in rulings nearly as creatively evasive as the DOJ’s lawyers have proven this week. But the Roberts court majority might as well slit their own wrists as allow Yertle to declare himself unreviewable by the judicial branch.
* * * * *
Have you fought the coup today?
National Day of Action, Saturday, April 5
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions