A federal judge says the Trump administration may have “acted in bad faith” by trying to rush Venezuelan migrants out of the country before a court could step in to block their deportations to El Salvador.
There’s not a goal post being moved. I’m describing now where the line has always been for a constitutional crisis: a judicial contempt order that gets disregarded by the executive branch. And the path to that is basically:
The executive branch does something illegal.
Someone sues in court.
The court rules that action to be illegal.
The executive branch doesn’t obey the court order.
The court orders the executive branch to show cause why contempt should not issue.
The court finds the executive branch officials to be in contempt and orders sanctions (aka a punishment).
The executive branch disregards that punishment and refuses to enforce it or obey it.
Steps 1 through 3 are pretty routine, and happen all the time.
And there are off ramps that avoid that constitutional crisis. Maybe it’s a case where the court’s ruling gets overruled on appeal. Maybe the court finds that it doesn’t have jurisdiction to rule on that issue. Maybe the executive branch backs down. One of those has happened so far in all of the cases that have ended.
It’s the cases that are still active where things might go off the rails. This particular Salvadorean deportation case has made it further than any other (past the fifth step I described above) and is the one where DOJ has suspended its own lawyer for admitting that he didn’t have the answers the judge was looking for. In a closely related case, DOJ has suspended its own lawyer for admitting personal frustration with his client (that is, ICE/DHS). These are concerning and worth pushing back on at every turn, and to sound the alarms when that line is actually crossed.
This defeatist attitude, that Trump has already won and is unaccountable, is counterproductive. We’re still busy fighting, and we can still win because we haven’t lost yet.
There’s not a goal post being moved. I’m describing now where the line has always been for a constitutional crisis: a judicial contempt order that gets disregarded by the executive branch. And the path to that is basically:
Steps 1 through 3 are pretty routine, and happen all the time.
And there are off ramps that avoid that constitutional crisis. Maybe it’s a case where the court’s ruling gets overruled on appeal. Maybe the court finds that it doesn’t have jurisdiction to rule on that issue. Maybe the executive branch backs down. One of those has happened so far in all of the cases that have ended.
It’s the cases that are still active where things might go off the rails. This particular Salvadorean deportation case has made it further than any other (past the fifth step I described above)
and is the one where DOJ has suspended its own lawyer for admitting that he didn’t have the answers the judge was looking for.In a closely related case, DOJ has suspended its own lawyer for admitting personal frustration with his client (that is, ICE/DHS). These are concerning and worth pushing back on at every turn, and to sound the alarms when that line is actually crossed.This defeatist attitude, that Trump has already won and is unaccountable, is counterproductive. We’re still busy fighting, and we can still win because we haven’t lost yet.