Trump vs. the last democratic guardrail: the courts
CBC
In a corroding American democracy, there's one guardrail still standing. The court system. President Donald Trump is testing it, he's pushing it, but so far has not kicked it aside.
Time and again, he has run into court orders — rulings that have restrained him, constrained him, and told him no, you can't always get what you want.
Trump has so far stopped short of crossing the democratic Rubicon of blatantly defying a court order, a line no U.S. president has breached in at least a century and a half.
"In the early going here, the courts have been our saviour," said Harold Hongju Koh, former dean at Yale Law School, a constitutional law professor, and legal adviser to the State Department during the Obama presidency.
And yet: "We're in a state of breakdown of constitutional democracy."
Trump has unleashed a barrage of actions his critics call unconstitutional or unlawful, at a speed and scale unseen in recent history.
As a result, dozens of lawsuits are flying in every direction. And the president has suffered more than a dozen legal setbacks in recent days.
The courts have paused, at least temporarily, his tightening of access to U.S. citizenship, refusal to spend funds approved by Congress, firing aid workers en masse, deleting public-health websites, and giving Americans' banking data to Elon Musk.
Trump's response? He'll fight back the democratically conventional way — by appealing. He's complaining about the judges, calling their actions overreach, but he hasn't crossed that final frontier.
"I always abide by the courts," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday, seated beside Musk, his billionaire aide. "I'll have to appeal."
The well-heeled consigliere has proposed going one step farther. In an online post, Musk suggested impeaching judges who defy the "will of the people."
Others are girding for battle.
On the right-wing Newsmax network, a host asked whether it was time to ignore the courts and a conservative lawyer, in reply, proposed alternatives to outright defiance — impeachments, congressional investigations and even a funding freeze so judges can't pay clerks.
The reason so many eyes are glued to Trump's reactions is that other ramparts of the American republic are crumbling.
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