“In August, President Donald Trump took over the police force in Washington, D.C., and flooded the city with officers from various federal agencies. As part of this show of force, federal agents arrested hundreds of people, while prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia—led by interim U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro—seemingly intended to throw the book at them, whether or not the punishment actually fit the crime.
This week, one of the administration’s more high-profile cases crashed and burned at trial.
In July, according to a charging document, D.C. resident Sydney Reid filmed with her phone as agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) took two people into custody from the city jail. When one ICE officer told Reid to move back, she “continued to move closer to the officers and continued to record the arrest.” When she didn’t reply to further commands, an officer pushed her against the wall, and FBI Agent Eugenia Bates stepped in to assist as Reid “was flailing her arms and kicking and had to be pinned against a cement wall.” During the scuffle, the indictment claims Reid “forcefully pushed [Bates’] hand against the cement wall” and “caused lacerations,” and it includes a picture of her hand with two red marks.
Reid was arrested for “assaulting, resisting, or impeding” federal officers, a felony punishable by up to eight years in prison. But when prosecutors presented the case, a grand jury declined to indict—not once or even twice, but three separate times.
This is not unique to Reid: In August, the same month, prosecutors also failed to secure a grand jury indictment against Sean Dunn, the Department of Justice employee who threw a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection officer stationed in D.C. In fact, within three weeks of Trump’s D.C. takeover, grand juries declined to return indictments at least seven times.”
“Federal law says the president of the United States may only call state National Guard members “into Federal service” when certain specific conditions are met, such as when “there is a rebellion or danger of rebellion against” the federal government, or when “the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”
According to President Donald Trump, he alone gets to decide when or if such conditions exist. Or, as Trump recently argued in a legal filing to the U.S. Supreme Court, “such decisions are committed to the discretion of the President and are unreviewable” by the federal courts.”
“this supposed civil libertarian also wrote the majority opinion upholding concentration camps for innocent American citizens. And Black did not even express any public regret over his Korematsu ruling in the decades to come. “It is noteworthy,” the legal scholar Stanley Kutner once observed, “that in an interview shortly before his death, Justice Black maintained that both the President and the Court had been right in their wartime actions.”
According to Black, the outcome in Korematsu was dictated by the existence of emergency conditions and the resulting judicial deference owed to the executive branch. “The military authorities considered the need for action was great, and time was short,” Black declared. “We cannot—by availing ourselves of the calm perspective of hindsight—now say that at that time these actions were unjustified.”
Writing in dissent, Justice Frank Murphy, another Roosevelt appointee and ardent New Dealer, argued that the president’s actions were, in fact, clearly unjustified at the time he took them. “It is essential that there be definite limits to military discretion, especially where martial law has not been declared,” Murphy wrote. “Individuals must not be left impoverished of their constitutional rights on a plea of military necessity that has neither substance nor support.””
““In Portland, protests have endured for months, and the [Portland police have] been either unwilling or unable to respond to the disturbances,” the appeals judges wrote.
Nelson and Bade said Immergut relied too heavily on Trump’s social media commentary — calling Portland “war ravaged” — to conclude that his deployment was “untethered” from reality, noting that the unrest had required a surge of law enforcement from the Federal Protective Service to contain.
The 9th Circuit panel majority repeatedly cited a similar decision issued by three colleagues permitting Trump’s deployment of Guard troops to Los Angeles earlier this year. In the ruling, the judges said Trump is owed great deference in determining whether civil unrest reaches a point in which the military may be called in for support.
The majority said Immergut used a faulty definition of rebellion in her decision, but the appeals judges did not address whether Trump had a valid claim that such unrest was underway when he sent in the Guard. (They did say they were not endorsing Trump’s description of Portland as a “war zone.”)
The appeals panel’s dissenting judge, Clinton appointee Susan Graber, called the majority’s decision ”absurd,” pleaded with her 9th Circuit colleagues to quickly reverse it and urged the public to “retain faith in our judicial system for just a little longer.”
“We have come to expect a dose of political theater in the political branches, drama designed to rally the base or to rile or intimidate political opponents. We also may expect there a measure of bending—sometimes breaking—the truth,” Graber wrote. “By design of the Founders, the judicial branch stands apart. We rule on facts, not on supposition or conjecture, and certainly not on fabrication or propaganda.”
Graber emphasized that even though there had been unruly protests in Portland in June, they had largely subsided and by September routinely featured 30 or fewer demonstrators and virtually no violence or requests for local police assistance.”
“Why does Trump keep winning these preliminary emergency requests before SCOTUS? Unfortunately, we do not always know why because the Court does not always say why. Many of these emergency orders—which critics often call the shadow docket—are issued without an accompanying opinion that explains the Supreme Court’s thinking.
…
As The New York Times put it, “more than three dozen federal judges have told The New York Times that the Supreme Court’s flurry of brief, opaque emergency orders in cases related to the Trump administration have left them confused about how to proceed in those matters and are hurting the judiciary’s image with the public.”
Moreover, according to the same Times article, it is not just liberal judges doing the complaining
…
Whenever the Trump administration asks the Supreme Court to issue this sort of emergency order in its favor, the justices are basically forced to grapple with the following questions: Is it better in a particular case to let the president carry out his contested agenda right away? Or is it better in a particular case to keep the president’s contested agenda on a temporary pause while the courts—after full briefing and arguments, including oral arguments before SCOTUS—have determined that the agenda does in fact pass constitutional or statutory muster?
The Supreme Court’s current majority does seem to think that it is generally better to let Trump’s agenda speed ahead. But even if that pro-executive approach is the correct one—which is a pretty big if—the majority is not doing itself any favors by keeping its pro-executive reasoning to itself.”
“Young’s ruling came in response to one of the Trump administration’s signature policies, its attempts to shut down Palestinian solidarity protests by deporting Palestinian students and their supporters. The American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association sued a few days after the arrest of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, arguing that the policy violates freedom of speech, both by intimidating foreign academics in America and preventing American academics “from hearing from, and associating with, their noncitizen students and colleagues.”
Ruling that administration officials indeed “acted in concert to misuse the sweeping powers of their respective offices to target non-citizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their First Amendment protected political speech,” Young promised to hold a hearing on the specific measures he will order. He wrote that “it will not do simply to order the Public Officials to cease and desist in the future,” given the current political environment.
…
The ruling itself meticulously outlined how several different activists—Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Mohsen Mahdawi, Yunseo Chung, and Badar Khan Suri—were targeted for deportation and how the administration justified it, both internally and publicly. Although Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeatedly claimed in the media that the deportations were meant to target “riots” on campus, Young shows that the students were often targeted based on their opinions alone, with vague chains of association linking them to violent protests.”
“In 1935, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously held that President Franklin Roosevelt acted illegally when he tried to fire an anti-New Deal commissioner from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC “cannot in any proper sense be characterized as an arm or an eye of the executive,” declared the Court in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. “We think it plain under the Constitution that illimitable power of removal is not possessed by the President in respect of officers of the character of those just named.”
But that was then. More recently, the Supreme Court has all but announced that Humphrey’s Executor faces imminent judicial execution, an outcome that would allow President Donald Trump (and every president who succeeds him) to fire “independent” agency heads at will.”
“The Supreme Court is allowing President Donald Trump to keep a Biden-appointed member of the Federal Trade Commission out of her post for at least three more months, despite a century-old federal law aimed at limiting the president’s power to fire such officials for political reasons.
The justices said Monday they will hear arguments in December about whether that law unconstitutionally interferes with the president’s ability to control the executive branch. If the court strikes down the law — as many legal experts expect — it will further hobble Congress’ ability to insulate the leaders of regulatory agencies from political pressure.”
Why have a Congress if the president can just ignore its laws? Why have a Constitution if the president can just ignore it? The power to spend is clearly given to Congress. The President is supposed to execute that spending. This is the president refusing to faithfully execute those laws, clearly violating the division of powers spelled out in the Constitution.
“The Supreme Court on Friday extended an order that allows President Donald Trump’s administration to keep frozen nearly $5 billion in foreign aid, handing him another victory in a dispute over presidential power.
With the three liberal justices in dissent, the court’s conservative majority granted the Republican administration’s emergency appeal in a case involving billions of dollars in congressionally approved aid. Trump said last month that he would not spend the money, invoking disputed authority that was last used by a president roughly 50 years ago.
The Justice Department sought the high court’s intervention after U.S. District Judge Amir Ali ruled that Trump’s action was likely illegal and that Congress would have to approve the decision to withhold the funding.”