The Supreme Court is clued in to Donald Trump's plan to undercut their power, an ex-prosecutor said on Saturday.
Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance over the weekend posted an essay explaining the various deportation cases in which Trump's administration is involved. As part of that explainer, Vance sounded the alarm about what she sees as Trump's agenda.
" Trump is trying to break the government. To control all its levers, he needs a complicit judiciary to go along with a complacent Congress," she wrote on Substack. She then added, "The Supreme Court seems to have an inkling of the fix they’ve put themselves in, with Trump trying to accumulate power at the courts’ expense."
Vance went "into the weeds" to describe the numerous deportation cases involving the Trump administration, and then issued a clarification:
"But keep in mind that while the substance of this dispute centers on the policy goal of deporting people Trump calls criminal illegal aliens, it is also a vehicle this administration is using to undercut the ability of the courts to act as a check on the executive branch and make it easier for Trump to range beyond the authority the Constitution affords to the president."
After following the cases winding their ways through the courts, Vance summarized the most recent development in a major deportation case.
"That’s how we got a middle-of-the-night ruling from the Supreme Court, with ACLU lawyers racing to the Court for emergency protection for their clients, which the Supreme Court ultimately granted. At least for now, their clients cannot be deported, unless the Trump government wants to directly violate the Supreme Court’s order," the attorney wrote.
She then concluded, "I’m tempted to point out that the Supreme Court brought this upon itself, with the ruling in [J.G.G. v. Trump], but that would be petty on my part." J.G.G. is the case in which "the ACLU challenged the government’s deportation of two planeloads of Venezuelans to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act," according to Vance.
A conservative talk show host drew fire from all sides after suggesting Donald Trump and his administration should simply "ignore the Supreme Court" and potentially even "dissolve" it.
On Saturday, he turned his attention toward the nation's top court after it temporarily halted the Trump administration's deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members under an 18th-century law.
"Ignore the Supreme Court. Arrest anyone who tries to enforce this. Dissolve the Supreme Court entirely if they push. You can deport foreigners or you don’t have a country anymore. There are no good choices now," Kelly said. "Donald Trump is the last thing before we get a dictator. I wonder if he knows this. Not a left wing dictator either. The Right will demand a dictator if Trump is not allowed to implement the will of the voters. And they will get one. A terrible place to be as a country."
This prompted some conservatives to criticize Kelly's position.
Veteran and Texas conservative Mack Latimer, for instance, said, "This is not conservative."
"This is authoritarian," he added on Saturday.
Libertarian Chase Oliver said, "Go, and I can't stress this enough, f--- yourself."
Political analyst Rachel Bitecofer also weighed in, saying, "But don’t call them fascists."
Civil rights litigator Patrick Jaicomo chimed in with, "What a stupid post."
A key White House official is insulting Chief Justice of the United States John G. Roberts, Jr., and the nation's top jurist should know, a legal expert said on Saturday.
It all started with the Supreme Court over the weekend temporarily halted the Trump administration's deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members under an 18th-century law.
That led one MAGA influencer to write on X, "As usual, Alito and Thomas are the only two Justices you can count on to uphold the integrity of our republic. Replacing them is going to be one of the most important issues of our time."
Paul Ingrassia, President Trump’s White House Liaison for Department of Homeland Security, followed that up with his own reply:
"Generations of lawyers and judges, on both sides of the aisle, have been infected with a parasitical ideology that denies reason and common sense, causing irreparable damage to our judicial system. This is why a putatively 'conservative' Supreme Court so often fails to uphold the most basic principles of constitutional governance," he wrote. The Trump admin official concluded with, "The judges in law courts today, including the majority in the nation’s Highest Court, telegraph with these decisions that they have no understanding of law and its proper function and role. President Trump is the first leader who has actually meaningfully attempted to reverse this destructive trajectory, and done so with the gravitas of executive power that will be sure to have a lasting impact for years to come."
"Hey, John Roberts?" Bower wrote. "The White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security is saying that you have 'no understanding of law and its proper function and role.'"
U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts recently made a rare statement about not calling for the impeachment of judges who rule against you, but that isn't stopping Pam Bondi.
MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin appeared on the news outlet on Saturday, and was asked by the host about a recent comment the Attorney General made regarding judges she wished to be "removed" after they ruled against President Donald Trump.
Rubin interpreted Bondi as saying either they would be recused from the case, or be impeached.
"But Pam Bondi, is she not hearing what Supreme Court Justice John Roberts said, that impeachment is not a venue for this kind of activity?" the host asked.
Rubin replied, "I don't think that Pam Bondi much cares."
"In some respects, nobody expects these judges to be impeached because as you know... in addition to passing an impeachment resolution in the House, then you have to two thirds of the Senate convict," Rubin added Saturday. "But Pam Bondi isn't trying to win votes in the Senate... this is a MAGA talking point, not something she's trying to win in the legal realm."
Chief Justice John Roberts may have been sending Donald Trump a message, but it's the President's response that concerned a Supreme Court writer on Saturday.
Slate senior writer Mark Joseph Stern appeared on MSNBC over the weekend, and was asked about Roberts issuing a rare statement suggesting that appeals, not impeachments, are how to handle court orders you don't like.
The writer said, "I think that as an institutionalist, John Roberts often operates like a pendulum, right? When there's a Democrat in office, he swings to the right. When there's a Republican in office, he swings not to the left, but more toward the center, and I think he's telegraphing to us that he is really not happy with the way that the Trump administration has conducted this case so far."
He added that there have been "these outrageous filings deriding and degrading Judge Boasberg to his face, asking for him to be disqualified from the case."
"You know, the president himself calling for impeachment. That is like the number one way to piss off the chief justice. And I think it's going to really work against the administration in court," he said. "And either they know that and they don't care, or they've decided that if and when the Supreme Court rules against them here, they'll just defy the order. And that's the most chilling possibility."
Donald Trump may have crossed a "redline" for Chief Justice John Roberts, an ex-prosecutor said.
Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance recently weighed in on a statement Roberts made about those, including Trump himself, who have suggested that a judge who ruled against the White House should be impeached.
According to Vance, Roberts' statement that “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision” is "clearly directed" at Trump.
Vance pointed to Trump's statement about the federal judge in question, in which Trump refers to the jurist as a "troublemaker" and an "agitator," and outlined the potential harmful outcomes.
"With that, the president of the United States places a bullseye on the back of yet another federal judge. This comes in the wake of a rise in threats against federal judges after Elon Musk criticized some judges’ rulings on Twitter. Back in December the chief justice criticized elected officials for trying to intimidate judges. He was concerned about impeachment threats then, as well," according to Vance. "That seems to be the redline for the chief justice, the threat of using impeachment in a way the Constitution does not intend."
Vance goes on to say that "it’s important that chief justice took this modest but unusual-for-the-court step today."
"Perhaps the chief justice will reflect on how frequently he has been called upon to do so during the Trump administration, something almost unheard of during other presidencies," she added. "Does it signal that the Court will protect the Constitution as cases begin to arrive there? It’s far too soon to say."
Vance noted that conservative anti-Trump lawyer George Conway told Roberts, "Welcome to the Resistance, Mr. Chief Justice.”
But Vance says, "Perhaps that’s a bit premature, or maybe he has finally realized the leopard wants to eat the judiciary's face."
"In reality, no one should expect or want the justices to take a side in a political fight—we’ve had enough of that with upside down flags and such already," she added. "What we are entitled to expect from the Court is an unflagging commitment to the Constitution, not to the president and it’s essential they do that if we are going to make it through this."
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Judge John G. Roberts Jr. hinted that he will reverse a key high court precedent for Donald Trump, an ex-prosecutor said.
Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance, who also works as a legal analyst for MSNBC, weighed in on Trump's efforts to consolidate his power at the federal level.
Writing for her Substack blog, Vance noted that Trump is trying to use the court system to overturn a major case from the 1930s.
"Humphrey’s Executor was the plaintiff in a 1930s court case. Mr. Humphrey, a Federal Trade Commissioner, had passed away, and the executor of his will wanted to recover the salary he was due for his work as a commissioner from October 8, 1933, to the time of his death on February 14, 1934. The problem was that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had fired Humphrey, who refused to resign," Vance wrote. "The issue on appeal was whether the president had the power to fire Humphrey. The Supreme Court ruled that he didn’t."
That decision, according to Vance, "clearly doesn’t make Trump happy."
"The Trump administration is in the process of trying to upend the division of power under the Constitution. It is trying to assume congressional power for the executive branch and undercut the legitimacy of the judiciary while exposing individual judges to threats," Vance added.
Vance then said, "The open question is whether the Supreme Court will reverse its own precedent and sign on to Trump’s view," before asking, "What will the Supreme Court do?"
Vance then points to "ominous signs" that purportedly "came from the notorious ruling last summer granting ex-presidents wide immunity from accountability to criminal law."
"That case did not rely on the unitary executive theory, but Chief Justice John Roberts could not help but sing the tune. The president is 'the only person who alone composes a branch of government,' he wrote," according to Vance's essay.
She adds, "The question is whether precedent will trump politics, or whether a conservative majority on the Supreme Court will continue to turn over the keys to the kingdom to the president."
Donald Trump is threatening to turn the Supreme Court's biggest fear into a reality, Bloomberg reported on Friday.
Trump and his officials have stirred controversy in recent weeks by flirting with the notion that they might defy lawful court orders, especially as it relates to Elon Musk's authority to make changes to the federal government.
In an article entitled, "Trump Will Force the Supreme Court to Face Its Biggest Fear Throughout US history," reporter Greg Stohr details the historical concerns about Presidents potentially ignoring lawful court orders. The "judiciary has worried that a president might simply ignore its decisions," according to Stohr.
"That age-old quandary is becoming newly relevant as Donald Trump tries to bulldoze his way through longstanding legal constraints in the opening weeks of his second term as president," Stohr reported. "As lawsuits over birthright citizenship, spending cuts and workforce purges make their way to the Supreme Court, the cases carry the potential for a genuine constitutional crisis. What happens, Chief Justice John Roberts must ask himself, if Trump loses and then defies the court?"
Stohr goes on to explain how Trump didn't defy judges when he was president the first time around, but noted that he appears to be "laying dangerous groundwork."
"Even Trump, for all his bluster, didn’t directly defy the judiciary in his first term. When a federal judge blocked his first travel ban in 2017, Trump blasted the ruling as 'ridiculous' and labeled the jurist a 'so-called judge' — and then complied anyway. His administration went along with Supreme Court rulings that blocked the inclusion of a citizenship question on the census and barred him from ending an Obama-era program shielding hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants from deportation," the reporter wrote Friday. "But danger signs have been growing. Trump kept trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat even after the Supreme Court unanimously turned away a bid he backed to nullify the results in four states. Trump’s recalcitrance created a stark contrast with Vice President Al Gore, who 20 years earlier told the nation he accepted the ruling that ended his presidential bid even as he disagreed with it.
J.D. Vanceraised the eyebrows of legal experts on Sunday by suggesting Donald Trump's administration might refuse to comply with a lawful court order. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court probably also noticed, according to a political analyst Sunday.
"I think the Supreme Court Chief Justice, Chief Justice John Roberts, is also paying attention to this particular tweet from J.D. Vance," Coley said. "And I'm not saying that he is normally following the tweets of a Vice President of the United States, but he saw this coming, the chief justice did."
He continued, noting that, "Back in December, he issued his end of year report, where he warned people of all parties of the necessity of holding themselves to the rulings of courts, even when people disagree with them."
"And he outlined over decades how administrations of all parties have disagreed with Supreme Court rulings, but still abided by them," he added. "So I think he's probably paying attention to this important development tonight as well."
The current U.S. Supreme Court has a stellar record of delivering wins for President Donald Trump, who appointed several of those who serve on its bench, but that could soon change, an ex-prosecutor said.
Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance on Thursday raised the issue of Trump's recent executive order purporting to end birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the nation's Constitution. The order was promptly put on hold by a judge, who ruled that it was indeed unconstitutional.
"John Coughenour, a federal judge in Seattle, put an end to Donald Trump’s pretense that he could undo the constitutional right to birthright citizenship," Vance wrote. "The Judge entered a nationwide injunction, temporarily prohibiting Trump from interfering with citizenship for people born in the United States, regardless of their parents’ citizenship status."
It seems like this case is destined for the nation's highest court but, unlike when its justices awarded Trump presidential immunity from prosecution, Vance says it appears the Supreme Court is ready to strike Trump down.
"It’s Trump’s first loss in court, only four days into his new administration, and it’s an important one. The issue, also being litigated in other courts, is headed to the Supreme Court. I don’t expect a different result there," she said, before adding, "That will surprise some of you given how willing this Court has been to put its thumb on the scale of justice in Trump’s favor. But my assessment that Trump will lose isn’t based on a belief that anything has changed at the Court."
Vance goes on to explain that her prediction is "based on an understanding of how foundationally anchored birthright citizenship is in the Constitution and the 14th Amendment."
"In other words, it won’t be a sign that our confidence in the Court should be restored when they rule against Trump," she then added. "The issue is so clear that it will simply be a reflection that there are some bars SCOTUS can’t fall below."
A Supreme Court Justice dubbed by the New York Times as Donald Trump's "judicial hero" once rejected a plan similar to the one put forth by Trump on immigration, an ex-prosecutor said.
It began with the Justice Department’s new management issuing a legal memorandum "directing prosecutors to investigate, and even prosecute, what they perceive as state or local efforts to obstruct immigration enforcement," according to former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance.
Vance characterized the memo as "an injection of poison into the bloodstream of democracy."
"Trump is threatening to prosecute those who don’t go along with his plans—legal or not, consistent with state policy or not, part of their job or not. The message is, bend your will to the leader or else. That’s autocracy," she wrote on Thursday.
She added that "the DOJ memo claims that the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution requires state and local officials to comply."
"But that’s wrong—state officials can’t be compelled to enforce federal law," she added, pointing to Trump "judicial hero" Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's findings.
"Just ask Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion in Printz v. U.S. The issue in that case was whether state and local law enforcement officers could be required to enforce interim provisions of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, for instance, by conducting background checks on prospective handgun purchasers. Justice Scalia held that the federal government could not require states to enforce or enact federal regulatory programs. Doing so would violate the states’ sovereignty," Vance wrote, adding, "In other words, what’s happening here is unconstitutional according to a widely venerated conservative Justice. Presumably, even an acting official at the Justice Department is capable of reading the law and knowing that what they’re ordering Justice Department employees across the country to do is contrary to well-established law."
A conservative Supreme Court justice's new book received a scathing review Tuesday from a former Justice Department prosector who described its contents as error-riddled, right-wing propaganda.
Ankush Khardori panned Justice Neil Gorsuch and his book "Over Ruled" in a lengthy Politico Magazine take-down that questions both the ethics behind the publication and a member of the nation's highest court.
"The book...is riddled with glaring factual omissions and analytic errors that seriously call into question its reliability and rigor," wrote Khardori. "It represents a remarkable attack by a sitting Supreme Court justice on the other two branches of government."
Khardori said Gorsuch ducked interview and comment requests for two months before his co-author, a former clerk named Janie Nitze, issued a statement dismissing his concerns as “nonsense.”
The former prosecutor took umbrage with many of the book's arguments, which he said misled readers with an emphasis on anecdote over evidence, but focused on Gorsuch's narrative of a commercial fisherman named John Yates and his undersized fish.
As Gorsuch tells it, Yates was improperly imprisoned for 30 days under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act — which criminalizes the falsification of objects to impede a federal investigation — after an agent seized 72 red grouper, then returned to discover the fisherman had quietly swapped out the offensive catches.
In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled the provision did not apply to "all objects in the physical world" and therefore did not cover Yates’ misconduct.
But Gorsuch's argument for federal overreach omits two points, Khardori argues: that Yates told a fellow fisherman to lie to the government and that he was also charged with destroying property seized by the government.
"These are not obscure facts — they are contained on the first two pages of the Supreme Court’s opinion — but they are not mentioned anywhere in Gorsuch’s account," the former prosecutor wrote. "What’s left out of the book is often just as instructive — if not more so — than what’s in it."
Other problematic anecdotes involve a magician regulated for use of a rabbit and a race car driver who received a $75 fine, according to Khardori, who ultimately concludes the book is an "embarrassment."
"If the problem of over-enforcement had actually become ubiquitous, then Gorsuch would not have to trawl through old media stories in order to make his point," Khardori wrote.
"Even setting aside the questionable optics, the book does not come close to establishing its thesis."
Last year, when Donald Trump’s attorneys declared he had “total immunity” from prosecution, many in the legal community scoffed. No president in all of American history had ever proclaimed they could not be convicted for serious violations of law—most infamously, President Richard Nixon had to have been keenly aware he might be criminally prosecuted.
Just eleven days after Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974, TIME reported, “Nixon’s new status as a private citizen puts him in grave peril.”
In fact, TIME continued, “the Watergate grand jury had vigorously wanted to indict Nixon while he was President.”
The American public is aware presidents can be prosecuted for certain crimes, and there is a foundational expectation of that possibility. In February of 2021, after the Democratic House impeached Donald Trump, Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell declared the ex-president should face criminal prosecution rather than impeachment.
“Donald Trump’s legal troubles are far from over, despite his acquittal in the U.S. Senate impeachment trial that ended on Saturday,” Reuters reported on February 16, 2021. “Minority Leader Mitch McConnell noted this just moments after voting to acquit Trump, saying the courts are the proper forum for holding the former president accountable for his role in the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters.”
We now know that after Special Counsel Jack Smith asked the U.S. Supreme Court to settle the claim of “presidential immunity” by Trump’s attorneys, it refused, waiting for a lower court to weigh in. Chief Justice John Roberts sent a “scathing critique of [that] lower-court decision and a startling preview of how the high court would later rule,” The New York Times reported last month.
“Behind the scenes, the chief justice molded three momentous Jan. 6 and election cases that helped determine the former president’s fate,” according to The Times’ reporting.
“’I think it likely that we will view the separation of powers analysis differently’ from the appeals court, he wrote,” The Times reported, offering this interpretation for the Chief Justice’s message: “In other words: grant Mr. Trump greater protection from prosecution.”
During oral arguments at the Supreme Court, Trump’s attorney, John Sauer, had literally argued a president could order a coup and be protected by immunity because it was an “official act” of the presidency.
Sauer also argued a president could order the assassination of a political rival and still have immunity from prosecution.
Chief Justice Roberts responded to the “momentous trio of Jan. 6-related cases…by deploying his authority to steer rulings that benefited Mr. Trump, according to a New York Times examination that uncovered extensive new information about the court’s decision making.”
In short, the Chief Justice used his powers to intervene and craft an opinion that some experts have said creates new law—certainly nothing that is found in the U.S. Constitution.
“There’s no legal authority for it,” remarked CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen back in December.
Nor, as the “originalist” far-right justices on the bench have adopted, does Chief Justice Roberts’ ruling lie in the “history and tradition” of the United States.
And yet, despite decades of history starting with Richard Nixon, and despite the scathing dissenting opinion from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, CNN reports on Tuesday, Chief Justice Roberts “was shaken by the adverse public reaction to his decision affording Trump substantial immunity from criminal prosecution. His protestations that the case concerned the presidency, not Trump, held little currency.”
“The Roberts Court has been in sync with the GOP political agenda largely because of decisions the chief justice has authored: For Trump and other Republicans. Against voting rights and racial affirmative action, against federal regulations over environmental, public health and consumer affairs,” CNN’s Chief Supreme Court Analyst Joan Biskupic reported. “Roberts, joined by his five fellow conservatives, found that the former president was entitled to presumptive, if not absolute, immunity for actions related to his official acts. Roberts’ view of official acts, as opposed to private ones, was vast.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion on Trump’s immunity blasted Roberts and the far-right justices, famously declaring:
“Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency. It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law. Relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom about the need for ‘bold and unhesitating action’ by the President, the Court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more.”
She also wrote:
“The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military dissenting coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune. Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.”
