In the first weeks of his second term, President Donald Trump has not lost time in the flexibility of his political muscle. It’s so clear.
Ever since he assumed his duty in January, he ordered the suspension of all new asylum requirements, canceled the relocation of refugees, frozen employment and consumption, agencies that established Congress, forbidden the care of gender transition for teenagers and offered a contract for hundreds of thousands of federal workers .
The whirlwind of unilateral action on promises on his campaign encouraged the boundaries of the presidential power – and encouraged the legal challenges of democrats, unions and legal groups. Until now, the federal courts have been the only essential blockages of the Trump agenda road, as the judges temporarily suspended some of the most controversial proposals, including the end of automatic citizenship for all born on US soil.
But Trump is pressing – and it seems that he made a calculation with a judiciary that could eventually end up in the highest court in the country. This week Judge Rhode Iceland said that Trump’s administration was Clearly and openly defying his court order to thaw billions in federal funds. The White House replied, saying that “every action” that the president had taken “completely lawful”.
If Trump’s commands reach the Supreme Court of the United States, six of the nine judges there – including the three names of Trump in his first term – is conservative. Only the last term, the court made a decision on Trump and all future presidents, mostly immune from criminal prosecution for official actions while on duty.
At that time, there was a significant spread of the presidential government. But some observers suggest that Trump’s latest moves could be part of the strategy for even more extending their powers. If high courts agree to support some of his executive commands, this could strengthen his ability to make changes to policy without congress.
Even if the courts rule against the president, says Ilya Shapiro, a constitutional expert at the Manhattan Institute, these legal defeats could be politically favorable.
“There could be political benefits from challenging in court and then even a loss in court, because then you can run against judges and make political hay from that.”
However, there is another scenario. Trump could simply refuse to adhere to any court trying to stop his implementation of uninformed presidential power.
In the oval office, comments on Tuesday, the president hinted that it could be an option, in his typically oblique way.
“We want to remove the corruption,” Trump said. “And it seems it’s hard to believe the judge might say that we don’t want you to do it.”
“Maybe we have to look at the judges,” he continued. “I think it’s a very serious violation.”
On Sunday, Trump’s vice -president, JD Vance, was even blunt.
“The judges are not allowed to control the legitimate power of executive power,” he posted on the website of social media X. This view was similar to one Vance expressed in Podcast 2021, when he said that if Trump returned to power, he would refuse to adhere to to any court order who prevented him from release federal workers.
However, directly defying the judgment of the court, it would reduce the centuries of American history and present introductory conflicts in the constitutional crisis that sets the President against the branch of power intended to establish and interpret the Law of the Earth.
“I read her that President Trump tests the external boundaries of what he could escape, doing many things that are sharply against the law and maybe some things closer to the line,” said Fred Smith, a professor at Emory Law School.
“They break a lot of norms,” Smith added about his native Trump administration. “Why he does it, only he knows completely. But he does.”
So far, Trump and his allies have made aggressive comments about unfavorable court decisions in the public and in legal subjugation, but have not yet been sanctioned due to the failure of the court. When Trump has been the target of multiple persecution in the last four years, he often questioned the legitimacy of chairmanship judges, but his lawyers in the courtroom compared the laws and legal proceedings.
The Federal Judge at Rhode Iceland, who temporarily held another Trump’s freezing order of some federal consumption, warned in the court subfers on Monday that the administration violated his temporary refrain order, but stopped finding them in disobeying.
Conservative legal scientist Ed whelan wrote on X that he would be “extremely serious” that Trump’s administration defying the order of the Federal Court.
“I am open to the argument that truly extraordinary circumstances (creating wild hypothetical) could justify defying defiance,” Mr. Whelan wrote. “But in our constitutional system there should be a great assumption in favor of the compliance of executive branches with the commands of the Federal Court.”
If Trump is not respected, and therefore delegitimizes, the courts could return to bite him when the president comes to see how his legal program is being implemented, some legal experts say. Democratic states like California, for example, could be inclined to neglect the White House Directives and Federal Laws they do not like – and Trump would be difficult to press the courts to bring them to the heel.
“If the executive government decides that they will adhere to some court orders, but not others, it will determine that he will not receive any court orders that he wants to obey,” said Philip Bobbitt, a constitutional scholarship player at the Columbia University Law. “I just don’t think they thought that.”
When Donald Trump was renewing an oval office in January in January, he re -installed President Andrew Jackson’s portrait, which hung on the wall across from a decisive table in the first term.
The seventh US president is remembered for the critical moment of defiance of the Supreme Court of the United States. When Justices in 1832 decided to dispute the public between Georgia and Cherokee Indian Government, Jackson did not seem interested in following his direction.
Jackson allegedly said about the judgment of the General Justice: “John Marshall made his decision; now let him spend it!”
Almost 200 years later, Trump himself found himself on his own collision course with the US judiciary.
