Trump Is Trying To Seize Absolute Power – The Judiciary Can & Must Stop Him
When President Donald Trump, in one of his irrational online rants, called for the impeachment of U.S. District Court Chief Judge James Boasberg this week, he engaged in a gross misuse of his office and took another step toward a head-on confrontation with the federal judiciary.
Trump already has spurred multiple head-on confrontations with a compliant Republican-controlled Congress.
It’s not hard to see what Trump is after: absolute power.
President Trump is zealously attacking the other two branches of government with the apparent goal of making himself and his executive branch supreme and unaccountable.
Trump’s challenge to the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution by our Founders, if successful, would ultimately replace our democracy with a dictatorship.
Last month, I warned that the Trump Administration was taking steps to do this. A month later he is moving at dangerous, breakneck speed toward his goal of total control.
And he’s doing it in his typical style – by bullying, threatening, harassing, attacking, intimidating, demeaning, distracting, and lying.
We started down this road when the Supreme Court granted Trump broad immunity from criminal prosecution last year in Trump v. United States – historically one of the Court’s worst and most irresponsible decisions – with Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion going far beyond granting a President immunity from criminal prosecution.
The Roberts opinion included “some of the most far-reaching pronouncements about presidential power in the Court’s history,” according to Jack L. Goldsmith, a conservative former DOJ official in the George W. Bush Administration and now a Harvard Law professor.
According to Goldsmith, the Court “issued an incautious and uncareful ruling on broadly applicable exclusive presidential powers that Presidents will use to their enormous new advantage vis-à-vis the other two branches, especially Congress, until the Court, in more considered reflection, decides that it ruled imprudently and went too far.”
With these Court-endorsed powers as a backdrop, Trump and his loyalists believe they can ignore or evade laws, court decisions, the Constitution, and congressional authority.
The Administration’s sense of entitlement was shown, when, after Trump officials ignored Judge Boasberg’s order of a temporary injunction against an Administration deportation plan, Trump called for the Judge’s impeachment.
This was too much even for Chief Justice Roberts, who rebuked Trump in a rare public statement: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”
(It would have been nice if Roberts had considered what he was unleashing when he was writing his presidential immunity opinion last summer.)
With a Republican-controlled Congress currently acting as a Trump rubber stamp, it is the judiciary that must stand up to Trump’s power grab.
The lower courts are doing their part. On Tuesday, federal district Judge Theodore Chuang, in a lawsuit brought by USAID workers, ruled that Elon Musk and DOGE’s “unilateral actions to shut down USAID likely violated the United States Constitution.” Judge Chuang said that Congress had been deprived of its constitutional authority to decide what should be done with the agency it created.
As Trump puts the impeachment of judges in play, supported by Musk and his campaign money, the stakes have been raised. They will be raised even higher when Trump or his officials refuse to comply with injunctions or final court judgements. (Trump’s claim that he will defer to the courts appears to be a shell game, as Trump associates continue to ignore or evade court decisions.)
A recent Brennan Center report explains what courts can do if Trump or his officials defy court orders.
The big test will come when lower court cases dealing with the Trump/Musk chainsaw approach to chopping up the government reach the conservative Supreme Court. Then we will find out where the Court stands on such core issues as:
The constitutionality of the Impoundment Control Act, enacted to prevent the executive branch from refusing to spend funds appropriated by Congress.
The ability of Trump to unilaterally dismantle federal agencies established by Congress.
Whether birthright citizenship, the constitutional guarantee that grants citizenship to any person born on U.S. soil, can be overridden by Trump.
It’s then, and only then, that we’ll learn if the Supreme Court will join the Republican-controlled Congress in bending the knee to Trump, or if, instead, they protect our democracy and constitutional system of government and stand up to Trump’s dictatorial instincts.
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Fred’s Weekly Note appears on Thursdays in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter. Read this week’s and other recent newsletters here. And, subscribe for free here and receive your copy each week via email.
