Trump's Dangerous Disregard for the Courts - Galston, WSJ
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After Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court issued an order temporarily blocking the deportation of alleged members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, Tom Homan, the president’s border czar, told a Fox interviewer, “We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think.” Nearly two centuries ago, Alexis de Tocqueville noted a distinctive feature of America’s civic life: “There is almost no political question in the United States that is not resolved sooner or later into a judicial question.” Little has changed.
When legitimate questions about the meaning of a law and its application to specific cases are raised, the judiciary often steps in to answer them. This is how our system works, and Mr. Homan doesn’t have the authority to disregard it. As a government official, he has a duty to care what judges think, however emphatically he may disagree with them. This is Civics 101. But it seems Mr. Trump skipped that class. “We have rogue judges that are destroying our country,” he said in a recent Fox News interview. On Truth Social, the president denounced Judge Boasberg as a “Radical Left Lunatic” who should be impeached. This prompted Chief Justice John Roberts to remind Mr. Trump that “for more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”
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In Marbury v. Madison (1803), Chief Justice John Marshall declared that “it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is”—and, he might have added, for the other branches of government to accept the court’s judgment as authoritative, even when they disagree with it.
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The core problem with Mr. Trump’s understanding of the Constitution goes even deeper. During his first term, he told an audience at an event: “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” Article II gives a president broad powers, but Mr. Trump’s comment amounts to saying that a president’s decisions take precedence over those of the Article III branch (the judiciary) and the Article I branch (Congress). Much of what Mr. Trump has done in the early months of his second term rests on this proposition, which runs counter to the theory and letter of the Constitution. Congress and the judiciary are coordinate, not subordinate, branches of our government.
Mr. Trump’s approach represents the danger against which James Madison warned in Federalist No. 47: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” When executive orders supersede legislation and judges are threatened with impeachment for doing their jobs, this could be the eventual result.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trumps-dangerous-disregard-for-the-courts-legal-system-balance-of-powers-constitution-45e0fed3?st=or1gUk&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
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Wasn't there a French monarch who claimed that he and the state were the same? Or something..
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