Trump Snake montage
Trump’s snake shtick.
https://vimeo.com/262486734?fl=pl&fe=vl
Tag: presidential
John Roberts temporarily allows Trump to re-fire FTC member
“Chief Justice John Roberts is allowing President Donald Trump to put a Joe Biden-appointed member of the Federal Trade Commission out of her post while the Supreme Court considers a longer-term resolution of the legal battle over her firing.”
So, whether it’s legal or not, Trump gets to go ahead and do it, and even if it turns out to not be legal, much damage will be done and the law ineffective.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/08/john-roberts-rebecca-slaughter-trump-firing-00550758
The Federal Circuit’s Tariff Ruling Highlights the Audacity of Trump’s Power Grab
https://reason.com/2025/09/01/the-federal-circuits-tariff-ruling-highlights-the-audacity-of-trumps-power-grab/
Forget Obama: Trump’s Pen and Phone Are Bigger Even Than FDR’s
“They were the 187th and 188th executive orders of Trump’s second term, on just its 203rd day.
That’s more executive orders than predecessor Joe Biden issued in his entire presidency, 162. It’s also more than George H.W. Bush (166), Gerald Ford (169), and 24 of the first 25 presidents. (Ulysses S. Grant, with his 217 over eight years, will likely be eclipsed by Trump’s 2025 totals this fall.) Neither the famously power-expanding George W. Bush, nor Barack Obama of the notorious “pen and phone,” signed as many as 188 executive orders in any of their combined four terms.
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The move toward federal government by presidential fiat comes as a transformation not just of Republican orthodoxy, but of Trump’s own prior statements and actions.
At a campaign event in February 2016, the GOP front-runner complained that “the country wasn’t based on executive orders….Right now, Obama goes around signing executive orders. He can’t even get along with the Democrats, and he goes around signing all these executive orders. It’s a basic disaster. You can’t do it.” The next month, he vowed: “I want to not use too many executive orders, folks. Executive orders sort of came about more recently. Nobody ever heard of an executive order. Then all of a sudden Obama, because he couldn’t get anybody to agree with him, he starts signing them like they’re butter. So I want to do away with executive orders for the most part.”
The 2016 Republican Party Platform decried executive-branch overreach, starting a multiparagraph section on the subject with the declaration that “Our Constitution is in crisis.””
https://reason.com/2025/08/12/forget-obama-trumps-pen-and-phone-are-bigger-even-than-fdrs/
What J.D. Vance Gets Wrong About Judicial Deference to Executive Power
“Let’s start with the role of the courts. The idea that the judicial branch owes special deference to the elected branches of government was thoroughly rejected by the framers and ratifiers of the Constitution. “As to the constitutionality of laws,” Luther Martin told the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on July 21, 1787, “that point will come before the judges in their proper official character. In this character they will have a negative on the laws.” Federal judges, Martin explained, “could declare an unconstitutional law void,” thereby overruling the actions of the elected branches. None of the delegates disagreed with that.
“This Constitution defines the extent of the powers of the general government,” Oliver Ellsworth told the Connecticut Ratification Convention on January 7, 1788. “If the general legislature should at any time overleap their limits, the judicial department is a constitutional check. If the United States go beyond their powers, if they make a law which the Constitution does not authorize, it is void; and the judicial power, the national judges, who, to secure their impartiality, are to be made independent, will declare it to be void.”
James Madison, often called the “father of the Constitution,” made the same point in his June 8, 1789, speech to Congress introducing the Bill of Rights. The proper role of the courts, Madison said, was to act as “an impenetrable bulwark against every assumption of power in the legislative or executive.””
https://reason.com/2025/05/30/what-j-d-vance-gets-wrong-about-judicial-deference-to-executive-power/
The Emergency is Here (Part 2) | The Ezra Klein Show
Trump defying a Supreme Court order is a constitutional crisis. The crisis comes to a head with Congress derelict in its duty. The only one with the power to enforce limits on the president’s power is Congress through its power of impeachment and a little bit through passing legislation that restrains the president.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiBggW15jLk
Can Trump Fire Jerome Powell?
“Legally, the answer is complicated and untested. No Fed chair has ever been removed by a President.
The Federal Reserve Act allows for the dismissal of Board members, including the chair, “for cause.” But that has historically been interpreted as misconduct or incapacity, not policy disagreements. “The court would typically not see disagreements over interest rates settings as ‘for-cause,’” Binder says.”
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“Still, the Trump Administration appears to be laying the groundwork for a potential confrontation. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently told Bloomberg that he expects to begin interviewing possible replacements for Powell in the fall.”
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“At the heart of that debate is a nearly century-old legal precedent: Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, a 1935 Supreme Court ruling that limited the President’s ability to remove leaders of independent agencies without cause. The ruling has long shielded Fed chairs from political dismissal, but could soon be tested by a conservative Supreme Court.”
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“Trump has blamed Powell for failing to act aggressively enough to support economic growth, saying the Fed chair is “playing politics” by keeping interest rates steady. But central bankers—and many economists—argue the opposite: that an independent Fed is essential to managing inflation and stewarding the economy, and that caving to political demands could damage the economy and global trust in U.S. institutions.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-fire-jerome-powell-213123735.html
Trump’s Use of the Alien Enemies Act Violates Madison’s View of Presidential Power
“President Donald Trump claims that the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 grants him the power to deport certain Venezuelan-born aliens without due process based on the mere allegation of membership in a criminal street gang.
But the text of the Alien Enemies Act does not allow the president to do anything of the sort. “Whenever there shall be a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion shall be perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States, by any foreign nation or government,” the act states, the president may direct the “removal” of “all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being males of the age of fourteen years and upwards, who shall be within the United States, and not actually naturalized.”
The alleged crimes of the alleged members of the street gang Tren de Aragua do not meet this legal standard. There is no “declared war” between the United States and Venezuela, and there is no “invasion or predatory incursion” of the U.S. by “any foreign nation or government.” The gang is not a foreign state, and the gang’s alleged crimes, as heinous as they may be, do not qualify as acts of war by a foreign state. Trump’s frequent talk about a rhetorical “invasion” of the U.S. by undocumented immigrants utterly fails to satisfy the law’s requirements.
The fatal defects of Trump’s position are further illuminated when you compare Trump’s stance with James Madison’s 1800 “Report on the Alien and Sedition Acts.” (The Alien Enemies Act was one of the three laws that comprised the Alien and Sedition Acts.)
As Madison explained, there are two categories of “offences for which aliens within the jurisdiction” of the United States “are punishable.” The first category involves “offences committed by the nation of which they make a part, and in whose offences they are involved.” In this case, “the offending nation can no otherwise be punished than by war.” In other words, the offending nation in this case has committed an act of war against the United States. The aliens who fall within this category are “alien enemies.”
The second category involves offenses committed by aliens “themselves alone, without any charge against the nation to which they belong.” In this case, “the offence being committed by the individual, not by his nation, and against the municipal law, not against the law of nations; the individual only, and not the nation is punishable; and the punishment must be conducted according to the municipal law, not according to the law of nations.” The aliens who fall within this second category are “alien friends.”
Notice that “alien friends” may certainly be punished by the normal U.S. legal system for whatever crimes they commit while on U.S. soil. They may be deprived of their life, their liberty, and their property. But—and this is a big but—they may only be deprived of life, liberty, or property after they have received due process of law, which is what the Constitution guarantees to all persons, not just to all citizens.”
https://reason.com/2025/04/01/trumps-use-of-the-alien-enemies-act-violates-madisons-view-of-presidential-power/
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours | The Ezra Klein Show
Republicans in Congress are not acting like a co-equal branch designed to be a check on power grabs from the president. They are acting like a non-person character, or a non-person Congress.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lckYPwQj_NM
Opinion | All Presidents Test the Limits of Their Authority. Trump Is Doing Something Far More Radical.
“The Constitution’s text is clear that Congress must authorize appropriations and the president must “take Care” that those laws are “faithfully executed.” There is no basis in constitutional text or history for the president to claim open-ended power to impound funds in the manner of the OMB memo. In 1975, the Supreme Court rejected former President Richard Nixon’s claim to be able to spend less than Congress had appropriated. That ruling would have had to come out the other way if the president had a constitutional power to impound. (Perhaps aware of this reality, OMB issued a later memo claiming the freeze was not, in fact, an “impoundment.” But this is just a semantic sleight of hand: For entities that need federal funds this or next week in particular, there is no meaningful difference.)”
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“If anything, the Supreme Court has tightened the constitutional leash on such unilateral claims of executive authority untethered from a statutory anchor. With Justice Neil Gorsuch leading the charge, it has stressed instead the need for clear authority from Congress for the exercise of any delegated power, including the power to write regulations. The OMB memo makes a mockery of those decisions by allowing the president to do with money what now isn’t allowed with regulations.
It is true that there is a scattering of past instances of impoundment. But these isolated cases largely concern foreign affairs and national security matters. In 1803, for example, Thomas Jefferson declined to spend funds for 15 gunboats for fear that they would upend secret talks with a foreign sovereign, Napoleonic France. Whatever unilateral presidential authority exists over foreign affairs cannot constitutionally be spread with reckless abandon to cover any or all domestic spending.
Past presidents have also confronted conflicts between a legislative command and Congress’ failure to appropriate funds to execute that command. There, presidents are forced to make a choice between dueling statutory orders. Courts rarely address these conflicts. But it is striking to note that in a 2012 case involving competing mandates, the Supreme Court rejected the executive’s claim to be able to withhold promised funds.”
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“The impoundment power Trump’s White House asserts would drive a stake through Congress’ constitutional authority.
Exactly like the line-item veto invalidated by the Supreme Court in 1998, the claimed impoundment power is de facto power to selectively edit duly enacted laws. This claimed nonenforcement should elicit whiplash among conservatives. After all, it was red states such as Texas, aided by Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller, that once excoriated the Biden administration for negating federal laws on immigration via nonenforcement. (The Biden administration, however, could point to statutory conflicts that don’t exist in this case.)”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/01/29/trump-funding-freeze-power-grab-00201186