Trump-Court Confrontations Approach Flashpoint
Get caught up.
Many of the Trump administration’s unprecedented challenges to established precedent, federal laws and the US Constitution are likely to reach the Supreme Court.
Photographer: Al Drago/BloombergUS President Donald Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport what his administration alleged to be Venezuelan members of a violent gang has set aflame smoldering concerns among Democrats, constitutional scholars and others that the final guardrails on executive power are being breached. The law has been used only three times in US history and only when the nation was at war.
Noah Feldman writes in Bloomberg Opinion that the gang is not a government nor is it threatening the US with invasion or incursion, other statutory prerequisites. Faced with prompt judicial pushback, Feldman says a “suspicious” timeline indicates Trump may have ignored a federal court order to turn planes carrying the deportees around. If so, it would be among the more overt of a growing list of cases in which the administration has been accused of flouting judicial authority in violation of the checks and balances central to American democracy. Rather than back down from such a grave charge, the administration (though denying it violated the court order) intensified its attacks on federal judges.