President Donald Trump is fighting back against the biggest legal losses of his second term.
After the Supreme Court handed the president multiple defeats this term on several top priorities, his administration has refused to back down and quickly moved to find loopholes. The pushback also has extended to lower court rulings, underscoring how Trump’s team is unrelenting in attempting to deny its critics the final say, even if its efforts are unlikely to be successful.
The White House is testing the high court’s ruling that established special protections for Federal Reserve officials from dismissal by pushing ahead with an effort to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook. Executive orders limiting so-called birth tourism will test the justices’ upholding of birthright citizenship, and a move to strike down Trump’s global tariffs has essentially been replaced with 10% to 12.5% duties tied to forced labor concerns.
“The real message here that everyone needs to take away is the president is not going to allow his trade policy and overall objectives to be undermined simply because one tool may be limited by a court,” a senior administration official told reporters in late July while announcing Trump’s new tariffs.
That tariff regime is already under scrutiny after a group of 25 Democratic attorneys general sued the administration last week, alleging that those duties on scores of countries, including some that currently ban products made by forced labor, exceed Trump’s authority to tax imports.
A trifecta of Trump’s former personal lawyers are now leading the charge, holding some of the most high profile legal roles in the Trump administration, including Attorney General Todd Blanche, White House counsel Will Scharf and Solicitor General John Sauer.
Recent legal decisions have a common thread: judges continue to affirm congressional powers laid out in the Constitution, including lawmakers’ authorities to rename government buildings, pass expansive duties and amend the Constitution itself. The White House did not offer a comment about its legal strategy.
Elsewhere, Trump is also petitioning the Supreme Court to step in to allow him to continue building a 90,000-square-foot ballroom on the White House complex after the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia determined that congressional authorization was required for the structure. Norm Eisen, founder of Democracy Defenders Fund, a nonprofit that has pushed back against many of Trump’s actions, bets that the high court will deny Trump’s request.
“Donald Trump’s illegality has been so outrageous that they’ve been forced to slap him down again and again,” Eisen said in an interview, “despite the, at times, authoritarian-enabling tendencies of the [Chief Justice John] Roberts’ court.” He nodded to legal opinions that have favored an expansive view of executive power.
Trump’s allies are also eyeing a cheeky workaround to a federal district court ruling that ordered the president’s name removed from the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts by instead proposing an inscription that would read: “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.”
Trump called into the center’s virtual board meeting last week, where members voted on an effort to add his name back to the building, although the proposal was not included on the meeting’s agenda beforehand.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., a congressionally appointed member of the Kennedy Center’s board, said there was no legal justification provided that offered “any support” that the vote “would pass muster with the judge who already decided that nobody’s name is allowed to go onto that building.”
In that meeting, according to Whitehouse, Trump “went on about the ballroom” with “no mention of the federal court order out of the D.C. Circuit saying that he has no right to build the ballroom.” (Trump serves as executive chairman of the Kennedy Center board, a first for a U.S. president.)
After knocking down the White House East Wing to make way for the ballroom, a judge permitted the administration only to continue building security-related infrastructure, while above-ground construction of the ballroom itself was halted.
“The American people own the White House, that Congress is the landlord, and that he is the four-year tenant, and like any four-year tenant, he doesn’t get to go knock down a wing of the landlord’s building,” Whitehouse told MS NOW’s “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.”
Michele Goodwin, a Georgetown Law professor of constitutional law, noted that there have been an unprecedented number of lawsuits filed against the administration since the beginning of Trump’s second term — more than 800. Trump openly insults Supreme Court justices or federal judges that issue judgements that conflict with his wishes, especially when those individuals were appointed by him.
“Even if that was the president’s thinking, that they would do his bidding, they’ve decided not to,” Goodwin said. “Overall, this is an administration that has shown very little respect for the rule of law, whether it has come from legislative decisions, whether it’s come from Supreme Court decisions, [and] very little respect for the Constitution itself.”
Fallon Gallagher contributed to this report.
The post The courts keep blocking Trump. He keeps searching for loopholes. appeared first on MS NOW.
