How Judges Held One Of Their Own Out To Dry In Historic Case
INSIDE: James Boasberg ... Billy Long ... Ken Paxton
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
A Capitulation For The Ages
It’s hard to overstate the significance of Friday’s appeals court ruling by two Trump appointees short-circuiting the criminal contempt of court proceeding in the Alien Enemies Act case.
For everyone closely monitoring the federal courts for signs they would cave to the Trump II onslaught, the ruling by Judges Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao (Obama appointee Cornelia Pillard dissented) was the manifestation of a worst-case fear: Namely, that higher courts will not backstop trial judges when they are faced with utter defiance from the Trump administration.
The Alien Enemies Act case was a prime test case for how far the judiciary would let Trump go. It pitted Chief Judge James Boasberg of D.C., a skilled and respected jurist, against some of the most egregious conduct by the administration thus far, including its blatant refusal to comply with his court orders and its extraordinary obfuscation and gamesmanship to try to obscure what it was actually doing.
The case ripened even further into a historic constitutional clash when a fired DOJ attorney turned into a whistleblower and started releasing internal DOJ communications that provided astounding new evidence of the department’s contemptuous conduct, implicating the very highest levels of government.
The two Trump judges’ craven effort to make Boasberg’s contempt inquiry go away doesn’t just eliminate accountability for the misconduct in this case but risks undermining any check to the Trump administration in the other major anti-immigration cases and all of the other cases where the White House is seeking to run roughshod over the judicial branch.
For these reasons, the case is primed for review by the entire D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose 11 active members are split 7-4 in favor of Democratic appointees. From there, the Supreme Court will be asked to weigh in. Confidence that the Roberts Court will defend Boasberg and trial judges is already low, which makes the capitulation by appeals court judges even more alarming.
But in some ways it’s even worse than all that. Had the Trump administration complied with Boasberg’s order, the 200+ Alien Enemies Act detainees would have never ended up imprisoned at CECOT and the course of history would have been changed. A whole series of subsequent legal battles fought on the heels because the AEA removals were already a fait accompli would have been waged from a different posture. The administration would have been denied the opportunity to defy courts in new and inventive ways in those subsequent cases, avoiding a whole round of challenges to the judiciary’s constitutional powers.
That’s a long way of saying that this was the ultimate contempt of court. If it goes unpunished – and the appeals court ruling means it’s likely to go not just unpunished but uninvestigated – then it will be open season on the judicial branch by the White House.
No other case right now carries the historical weight of this one. Stay tuned.
Don’t Soft Sell It
Oddly neutral language from major news outlets to describe the Trump DOJ abusing the powers of its office to exact retaliation and retribution against the president’s perceived political enemies Letitia James and Adam Schiff (emphasis mine):
NYT: Justice Dept. Abruptly Escalates Pressure Campaign on a Trump Adversary
AP: Justice Department escalates scrutiny of Trump foes with probes of Letitia James and Adam Schiff
Good Read
Asha Rangappa: The FBI As We Knew It is Gone
Why Was Billy Long Ousted from IRS?
WaPo:
The Internal Revenue Service clashed with the White House over using tax data to help locate suspected undocumented immigrants hours before Trump administration officials forced IRS Commissioner Billy Long from his post Friday, according to two people familiar with the situation.
The Department of Homeland Security sent the IRS a list Thursday of 40,000 names of people DHS officials thought were in the country illegally and asked the IRS to use confidential taxpayer data to verify their addresses, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
Paxton Asks Texas Supreme Court To Expel Dems
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) is asking the state Supreme Court to expel 13 Democrats from the state House after they fled the state to deny Republicans a quorum in the mid-decade redistricting scheme.
Appeals Court Defends Congress From Trump Rampage
Led by Bush I appointee Karen Henderson, the D.C. Court of Appeals defended Congress’ prerogatives by ordering the Trump administration to restore an OMB website that tracks the apportionment of federal funds.
Trump Attack on Higher Ed: UCLA Edition
The Trump administration is seeking to extort more than $1 billion from UCLA – under the guise of enforcing civil rights law – to restore its federal research funding.
The Long Reach of the Roberts Court
A very accessible overview from Adam Liptak of the myriad ways the Roberts Court has and continues to undermine democracy through election law cases:
Taken together, the court’s actions in election cases in recent years have shown great tolerance for partisan gamesmanship and great skepticism about federal laws on campaign spending and minority rights. The court’s rulings have been of a piece with its conservative wing’s jurisprudential commitments: giving states leeway in many realms, insisting on an expansive interpretation of the First Amendment and casting a skeptical eye on government racial classifications.
So Dangerous
At the start of Trump II, Morning Memo noted that a crucial question was whether corporate America would hold the line against Trump or capitulate to a MAGA-branded crony capitalism that substitutes toadyism and favor-seeking for free markets. It’s not going well.
Quote of the Day
“This is the sort of thing only the worst populists do in the worst emerging economies.”– economist Phil Suttle, on President Trump’s Aug. 1 dismissal of Erika McEntarfer as commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics
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Re: tRump interfering in companies' businesses...the latest outrage is that tRump demands a 15% "cut" of chip sales to China delivered by Nvidia and AMD! Allegedly, this export "tax" is said to go to the Treasury in exchange for granting the export license, but who's to say that tRump doesn't take a vig off the top as "contributions" to his "presidential liberry", ffs. Does anyone put this past the grifting felon?
Also, the three-judge panel of the DC Circuit that ruled cruelly against Chief Judge Boasberg by a 2-1 vote, included this gem from tRumpy judge Neomi Rao, who said in effect, "better to rule against Judge Boasberg than to invite a constitutional crisis if he went ahead with a contempt order". Uh, OK, but this IS the constitutional question, for god's sake! A runaway executive who heeds NO court order!
When, and if, this attack is eventually turned back, The Six will need to be dragged out of the Supreme Theocratic Court and tried with the rest of the MAGAts who participated in the treasonous coup and held to account at Nuremburg 2.0 during the detrumpification process to not only remove all the dug in parasites but also to assure this never happens again. It will be a long process to unfuck the system, undo rules and rulings, repeal and rewrite laws, perhaps amend the constitution, reinstate fired employees and overturned policies, reconstitute illegally terminated departments and boards, and basically rip up and replace all evidence of the junta's malfeasance.