President Donald Trump and his allies have launched a multipronged attack on the judiciary, punctuated over the weekend by his decision
not to comply with a federal judge’s order to halt the deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador.
It was not the first time the two-month-old Trump administration had not complied with a federal court. Judges have said Trump has
brushed aside their orders to
unfreeze spending on a variety of foreign and domestic programs.
The first instance was on Feb. 10, when a federal judge in Rhode Island blasted the government for having violated his order
halting a sweeping federal funding freeze.
[Judge] Boasberg,
during a fact-finding hearing on Monday evening, repeatedly asked a government attorney for answers to basic questions about what the administration did to comply with the order. He summarized the government's position as: "We don’t care, we’ll do what we want.”
[Notre Dame Law prof:]
“If a court gives an order and a court has jurisdiction and the party who’s given the order has notice of the order and knows what it means, then if you disobey it, that’s contempt,” he said.
“The administration’s arguments about being outside the territory of the United States and the order being oral rather than written are not good legal arguments."
[ACLU:] "Our country is based on the assumption that there are three equal branches and that the federal court will say what the law is and that the other two branches will adhere to those rulings. Once that ends, we’re in a very different situation in this country; we’re no longer a country based on the rule of law.”
Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School ... “If the executive can defy court orders whenever they feel like it, they are essentially not constrained by the Constitution and the laws anymore,” he added. “If they defy court orders and get away with it, they can basically do things that are illegal and there would be no easy way of stopping them.”
