3d ago

'Visceral fury': Trump 'hitting a wall' as judges rush to block his executive orders

www.rawstory.com 'Visceral fury': Trump 'hitting a wall' as judges rush to block his executive orders

Donald Trump's chaotic rush to push through a wave of changes to the government via executive orders is hitting "a wall" with judges who are already expressing anger and frustration in their rulings.That is according to a report from Politico's Kyle Cheney who noted that over nine judges across the ...

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.

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49 comments

Who will enforce the judges' rulings, is my question.
Or said another way: what prevents Trump and his goons and sycophants from simply disregarding them and carrying on whatever the hell they're doing unabashed?
- Nothing as far as I can tell, but the media, and even a lot of people on Lemmy still seem to think they care about the law or feel in any way obligated to abide by it. And I do not get it.
  
  It's not about this being some sort of firewall to stop him in his tracks or anything, the opportunity for that was last election, and we failed. It's now about being an effective opposition, just like they try do when we win.
  To paraphrase AOC, there needs to be sand in his gears. Yeah, he can push a lot of stuff through anyway, but we definitely want it to be as difficult as possible, costing them extra effort.
  Here's a kinda tired-seeming AOC chit chatting about all this stuff for 90 minutes on livestream:
  https://youtu.be/CVgNJf6CsBA
  Though the main battle is still over teaching logic and critical thinking to the public and individual civic dialogue imo.
  
  Bingo. It ultimately won't stop him, but every act of resistance will slow him down, and every act of submission will speed him up. Choose to resist.
  
  "There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."
  Mario Savio
  
  If he's willing to weaponize the pardon power (which we already know he is), there's no current way to stop him at all. Anything he does is protected by the 'presidential act' ruling, which is untested, but anything his lackeys do can just be pardoned, even pre-emptively before charges are brought. Since the pardon power is absolute and has no oversight, this would, as far as I can tell, stonewall any attempt to stop them unless that attempt is by literally barring the doors as they try to enter. The system was not designed to stand up to a bad actor of this magnitude; the recourse would be an impeachment but that's not happening unless he oversteps so massively that his own party turns on him.
  
  It provides cover for the resisting people in the agencies. Right now the nazis have the fig leaf of executing an EO when they enter these facilities and do their treason, and when the courts strip that it makes it legal (maybe required?) to bar physically them from the facilities
  
  ...at which point they get whichever security forces they want to physically force their way into the building. With weapons.
  You're still thinking they play by the rules when they just don't.
  
  Unless you're talking about borrowing ICE, the rest of the feds are also not participating in this so far or are also suing the administration. And the DC police seem to have pretty strong opinions from what I've read since '21. The Trump administration has not demonstrated they have the force level to storm these facilities in the face of active opposition and are counting on people just letting them in on their fraudulent authority.
  
  i thought the ultimate rule was to follow the Constitution ... like if a tyrannical president orders the army generals to kill everybody on Earth (or similar insanity) then, those generals will refuse the order based on the Constitution ... and same would go for other people in authority ... ?
  
  Turns out the Constitution is just an old piece of hemp paper.
  
  ... until the people rise to defend it ... i am still hoping.
  
  Maybe they shouldn't be worried about defending anything if they rise up.
  
  Even if the Trump administration is not compliant, the alternative would be approval of this coup d'etat.
  
  Another alternative is to resist them in mass action.
  But that requires effort.
- The actually physical people that are supposed to be affected play a big role. Short of locking people our of a space and systems, if an EO declared an agency "closed" but a judge said "nope, do it legal-like," people still showing up to work and expecting to get paid are all following the law.
  They hoped to be able to just wish this all away because they hate doing the real work of governing.
  
  people still showing up to work and expecting to get paid are all following the law.
  People aren't going to risk putting up a fight to defend their job. If Trump and Musk post goons at the entrance, no employee in their right mind will try to force their way in because they're legally supposed to be at work. They'll all stay at home and demand to be paid their salaries, because they were willing to work but were prevented to.
  
  Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Short of real humans locking the doors, just keep showing up.
  Doors locked? Work from home.
  No system access? OK, well you're not on paid leave, so does someone preventing you from earning an income have legal authority to do that? Sounds like a lovely lawsuit.
  Don't just roll over and disappear, that's giving them what they want.
  
  Don’t just roll over and disappear
  If I'm drawing a salary from you and you don't give me proper notice and a pink slip, I'll be all over you like a fly on a ripe turd. I don't think anybody who's lawfully employed by the agencies that have been taken over by Trump's goons are going to let the matter slide and sulk in their corner. It's just that a job isn't worth physically resisting said goons.
- In the end, I suspect he doesn't have the military sucking his cock. If he starts openly disobeying the rule of law, military officers have an obligation to overthrow him and protect the constitution. That's the one hope we have left.
  
  In the end, I suspect he doesn’t have the military sucking his cock.
  Yeah I think you got that right. He barfed on well-respected generals and disrespected veterans so much I don't think the military really loves Trump all that much.
  
  They'll never overthrow him. If he can't fill the top brass ranks with toadies, at most they'll just refuse to violate posse comitatus without a damn good reason for martial law.
- 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/
  
  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.
  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)?
  
  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.
  That's not strictly true. They could call the DC metro police. They could call the Virginia or Maryland National Guard.
  Since these are States that are suing, can a Federal judge authorize State police to take control if a Federal building with the purpose of keeping the Muskovites out?
  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.
- It would have to be us.
- Inevitably, he will defy the courts. And then, I fear, it is time for violence on both sides. “Very fine people”.
- Eventually it comes down to the military. If the military decide to park their tanks in front of the white house and shoot or bombs protesters it's game over. If they decide the president is a traitor and go after him then he's gone.

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