Whatever
So what’s not an emergency in one nation under Donald Trump?
A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that Donald Trump willfully broke the law. It wasn’t exactly banner headline news (Reuters):
San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer found that the Trump administration willfully violated a law known as the Posse Comitatus Act, which sharply limits the use of the military for domestic enforcement, by employing troops to control crowds and bolster federal agents during immigration and drug raids. The administration deployed 4,000 National Guard members and 700 active-duty U.S. Marines to Los Angeles in June.
Breyer put the ruling on hold until Sept. 12 to give Trump time to appeal, due process time the Trump administration won’t grant to migrants swept up in Stephen Miller’s anti-immigrant pogrom. Trump will appeal and appeal again until he loses in the U.S. Supreme Court. IF he loses in the Roberts Supreme Court. And if ultimately he loses, then what?
Nothing. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Because in Trump v. United States, the Roberts court ruled that Trump “is at least presumptively immune from criminal liability for his official acts, and is absolutely immune for some ‘core’ of them — including his attempts to use the Justice Department to obstruct the results of the election.” Even if he willfully breaks the law he swore an oath to uphold? Well, until someone kicks Trump in his swollen ankles for, if nothing else, his willful abuse of legal process.
Also on Tuesday, a federal appeals court slapped down Trump’s abuse of the Alien Enemies Act to deport undocumented migrants (New York Times):
The decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, was the first time that federal appellate judges had weighed in on the substantive question of whether Mr. Trump had properly invoked the law, the Alien Enemies Act, as part of his aggressive deportation agenda. While the ruling by a divided three-judge panel of one of the most conservative courts in the country was a defeat for the administration, the issue was still likely to be heard by the Supreme Court.
Mr. Trump had made the Alien Enemies Act, which was passed in 1798, the centerpiece of his earliest efforts to summarily deport a group of Venezuelan immigrants he claimed were members of the street gang Tren de Aragua. In March, he issued a presidential proclamation that drew on the law’s sweeping powers to round up and expel members of a hostile nation in times of declared war or during an invasion or predatory incursion.
But the appellate panel, in a 2-to-1 decision, rejected his assertions that the American homeland was in fact under invasion by Tren de Aragua, rebuffing the idea that immigration, even at a large scale, was synonymous with a military breach of U.S. borders.
There is no invasion. There is no emergency except in Trump’s fevered brain and his advisers’ xenophobic hearts.
Timothy Noah observes at The New Republic:
Illegal border crossings are an emergency. The Mexican cartels are an emergency. Failure to expedite mining and drilling on federal lands is an emergency. Illicit drugs coming in from Canada, China, and Mexico are an emergency (actually, three). The International Criminal Court is an emergency. The trade deficit is an emergency. Brazil’s prosecution of its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, is an emergency. Crime in Washington, D.C., is an emergency. Crime in Chicago and Baltimore may soon be emergencies, too. “We’re going in,” President Donald Trump said Tuesday. “I didn’t say when.”
Trump has declared nine national emergencies under the 1976 National Emergencies Act, or NEA, during the seven months he’s been in office. That’s 1.3 emergencies per month. If we include crime in D.C., which Trump declared an emergency under a different law—the 1973 Home Rule Act—it’s an even 10. For now. “We may declare a national housing emergency in the fall,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the Washington Examiner on Monday. That’s 11. Add Chicago and Baltimore and it’s 13, assuming Trump doesn’t dream up more emergencies to declare in the interim.
Trump is the emergency. “Your government is breaking,” Don Moynihan writes, taking up for federal employees who’ve watched Trump and DOGE dismantling it (and their lives) up close. And personal.
Noah concludes:
If Trump keeps declaring emergencies—and, of course, he will—the best response may be for protesters to create an emergency of their own through the expansion of nonviolent public protest. We’ve had May Day and No Kings Day and Good Trouble Lives and Workers Over Billionaires. How about Cut the Shit Day?
In August, the nonprofit Center for American Progress suggested, based on research by Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth and others, that it will take about 12 million Americans—a mere 3.5 percent of the population—to halt Trump’s abuses of power. This can happen. In March, I published a guide to resisting Trump. I’m no expert on this subject, but I consulted a lot of people who are, and they had some good ideas. We may need to try all of them, because the emergency emergency won’t end itself. We’re already seeing considerable mass protest. Let’s build on that.
Whatever. Ball’s in your court.
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