Summary
Judges across the U.S. are blocking Trump’s aggressive executive orders, with some rulings expressing deep frustration.
A Trump-appointed judge halted his attempt to place 2,200 USAID employees on leave, while another blocked Elon Musk’s team from accessing Treasury records.
A Reagan-appointed judge condemned Trump’s disregard for the rule of law in a ruling against his birthright citizenship plan.
These legal setbacks are forcing federal agencies to reveal more details and raising concerns over Trump’s expansive use of executive power.
This is what I don’t get.
There is a mechanism for doing this that’s fairly well grounded in the legal system. Go to a federal judge, explain that he’s continuing to break the law even though he’s not supposed to be, and ask for an order authorizing you to go and stop him, by force, with some officially designated force providers.
It’s what you do if someone owes you money and won’t pay. It’s what the cops do when they want to violate someone’s privacy. It’s not the judge’s job to wander off the bench and into the real world and make it happen for you. But there are plenty of people who it is their job.
Get a court order authorizing you to stop the illegality, get some law enforcement or military people to back you up, with the full force of the law behind them, and get to work. This cheat code of “IDC what the judge says” isn’t some new thing Trump discovered. People do it with their child support payments or bench warrants all the time.
We nominated people in government to be our representatives in this democracy, and keep it safe. It is, to a certain extent, their job to make that happen. I don’t get what is all the waiting for “someone” to do something about it.
Cops who work against Trump lose their jobs and risk having their names leaked to the Proud Boys and other J6 thugs. That’s the difference.
I could very well imagine a very similar comment being said in Germany around a hundred years ago. Something like “Constables who defend Jews risk losing their jobs and getting targeted by Brownshirts and other Beer Hall Putsch Nazi thugs”
Idk just popped into my mind
The thing is, if that were true, they wouldn’t need brownshirts, Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, or any of those people. They wouldn’t need the Florida State Guard. A bunch of cops and prosecutors have been putting Oathkeepers in prison for a while now. They used to treat them nice, and they still cut them slack they shouldn’t cut them, but roughly four years ago, they went to literal war against the Trump people. And the cops put their lives on the line, pretty much all in an organized force, to try to physically stop them from doing all this undemocratic shit. They are the only people I am aware of who’ve done that. And, ever since then, they’ve been a lot less nice to the Trump people, and actively working to stop them. Again, they’re some of the only organized groups in America who are actually doing their jobs about it.
All those police-like groupings who are explicitly loyal to Trump are necessary because the police, for the most part, are not loyal to Trump. Some individual cops are, but I think after January 6th, the institution has come down against.
I actually share, with some of the “whole system is the enemy” leftists on Lemmy and apparently with no one else in the world, a pretty specific interest in the exact history of the internal politics in Germany as it was collapsing into fascism in the early 1930s. It’s obviously relevant today. And it’s interesting to me that those modern-day leftists seem, universally, to apply the exact same “liberals are the enemy, the system is the enemy, we have to go to war against anything that isn’t left-wing enough, it’s the only way” mentality to what happened in the 1930s just as much as they do the modern day.
You know who was trying to mobilize votes and coalitions to stop Hitler from getting into power, while there was still time to stop him? The Democrat-equivalents of the day, the SPD. You know who was fighting them the whole way and saying they were the main threat to progress and safety, and the whole thing of Hitler was less of an issue? The communists.
You know who was giving speeches against Hitler, after the communist party was illegal, all of its leaders were imprisoned, some of the SPD was imprisoned, and the parliament was a haunting half-full chamber with the empty spots serving as a stark warning about what might happen to you if you spoke against him? The SPD. Otto Wels was the only person to give a fiery Bernie-Sanders-being-right-in-retrospect speech against it. The final vote for the Enabling Act, which was the final curtain before the real horrors could start, was the SPD bloc against, the Nazi minority for, and the bloc of people too scared to go against the Nazis because they might get physically attacked (that being everyone else by that point): For.
I don’t know if the communists, at that point, were still calling the SPD “the main enemy,” but that’s what they were doing for roughly as long as it was legal for them to function as a party, before the Nazis came for them.
Bottom line, allies are good when things are dangerous. Don’t fuck up alliances because you’re looking for excuses to make enemies.
This might give substance to that vague feeling of deja-vu you’re experiencing:
https://www.realtimefascism.com/
The issue is that this is all in Federal Court, and all of the “officially designated force providers” at that level are part of the Executive Branch. So who would agree to enforce this when Trump can just immediately fire them, even if he doesn’t have the legal right to do so? Even the US Marshals, who are intended to enforce stuff like this, are still part of the DoJ under the Attorney General. Can a court compel an AG to take an action if the President can just pardon all of her contempt citations from ignoring it?
Since these are States that are suing, can a Federal judge authorize State police to take control of a Federal building with the purpose of enforcing a Federal order that Federal forces refuse to enforce (and keeping the Muskovites out)?
That’s not strictly true. They could call the DC metro police. They could call the Virginia or Maryland National Guard.
Sure. If you have an order signed by the judge, most police of whatever agency are authorized to back you up. Whether they will is up in the air, in this case where everyone surely knows they’re touching off a shit-storm the true magnitude of which there is no way to know. But it has happened before. State Police backed up Archibald Cox when the FBI was ransacking his office. There are scenarios where one police agency with a judge’s order has faced off against another police agency who is trying to just out-stubborn them, and usually the side with the judge’s order wins. And surely the FBI hates Trump by this point. They could still have a bunch of personnel show up with somebody to enter the Dept. of Education by force, and Trump could call them on scene personally and tell them they’re fired, and they could still say, “Sorry, I’ll need that in writing, I am busy, I have to go now.”
Trump would surely come after the FBI, but he is doing that already. This is like “I can’t leave him, he’ll beat me” when he is already beating you every weekend. If it’s on, let it be on, man. At least keeping it within some kind of legal framework seems like it would be ten times better either than letting him continue to get away with it, or waiting for shit to pop off outside the legal framework.