Trump’s disregard for US constitution is ‘a blitzkrieg on the law’

Scholars warn of the president’s lawlessness in actions such as federal funding freeze and birthright citizenship order

Donald Trump’s rapid-fire and controversial moves
that have ranged from banning birthright citizenship to firing 18 inspectors general means the US president
has shown a greater willingness than his predecessors to
violate the constitution and federal law,
some historians and legal scholars say.

These scholars pointed to other Trump actions they say blatantly broke the law,
such as freezing trillions of dollar in federal spending and dismissing members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC),
-- even though they were confirmed by the Senate and had several years left in their terms.

“Without any doubt Donald Trump is the most lawless and scofflaw president we have ever seen in the history of the United States,”
said #Laurence #Tribe, one of the nation’s leading constitutional scholars
and a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School.

Tribe said Trump has carried out
“a blitzkrieg on the law and the constitution.

The very fact that the illegal actions have come out with the speed of a rapidly firing Gatling gun makes it very hard for people to focus on any one of them.

That’s obviously part of the strategy.”

Tribe said the so-called pause in federal spending that the Trump administration ordered last Monday
“was a clear usurpation of a coordinate branch’s [Congress’s] exclusive power of the purse”.

Before the Trump administration rescinded the freeze two days later,
several groups had sued to stop the freeze,
saying Trump had violated the constitution and the 1974 Impoundment Control Act,
which lets presidents withhold funds in limited circumstances,
but only if they first follow several special procedures
– which legal experts said Trump failed to do.

#Erwin #Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley School of Law,
also voiced dismay at what he said was Trump’s flagrant flouting of the law in his first few days back in office.

“A stunning number of his executive actions clearly violate the constitution and federal law,” Chemerinsky said.

“I cannot think of any president who has ever so ignored the constitution as extensively in the first 10 days of office as this.

“I certainly doubt that any president has done so much lawless so quickly that affects so many people,” Chemerinsky continued.

“The freeze of federal spending potentially affects tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of people.”

That freeze caused alarm and chaos across the nation as it disrupted Medicaid payments,
childcare programs,
meals for seniors,
housing subsidies and
special ed programs.

Matthew Vaeth, the acting director of the office of management and budget, said the freeze was needed to stop
“the use of federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies”.

Federal judges moved quickly to temporarily block the spending freeze and the ban on birthright citizenship.

Last Tuesday, a federal district court judge in Washington DC, #Loren #AliKhan, suspended the spending freeze.

Facing huge confusion and criticism over the freeze,
the Trump administration rescinded it on Wednesday.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/01/trump-executive-orders-constitution-law?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

US supreme court strikes down 40-year precedent, reducing power of federal agencies

The US supreme court has overturned one of its own most important precedents, the #Chevron #doctrine, that for the past 40 years has guided the work of federal government in critical areas of public life, from food and drug safety to environmental protection.

In a ruling that the Biden administration has warned could have a “convulsive” impact on the functioning of government,
the court’s hardline conservative majority delivered a major blow to the regulatory powers of federal agencies.
Voting as a block, the six rightwing justices who wield the supermajority threw out the supreme court’s own 1984 opinion in Chevron USA Inc v Natural Resources Defense Council, which has required the courts to defer to the knowledge of government experts in their reasonable interpretation of ambiguous laws.

Writing the opinion, chief justice John Roberts bluntly stated that the Chevron precedent “is overruled”.
He lambasted the legal theory laid out in the ruling, claiming it “gravely erred” and calling it was “misguided” and “unworkable” despite the fact that it has steered the functions of the federal government for four decades.

Roberts not only eradicated the Chevron doctrine, he turned it on its head.
Under his ruling, the relationship between courts and federal agencies is reversed:
in the modern era, the courts have shown deference to the expertise of agencies, but from now on the courts alone will decide.

“The constitution assigns to the federal judiciary the responsibility and power to adjudicate cases and controversies,” Roberts wrote.
“Agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.”

In recent years, the Chevron doctrine has become a central target of rightwing groups that blame it for what they see as a proliferation of government regulations executed by unelected bureaucrats in the so-called “deep state”.
A key group behind the supreme court challenge, the New Civil Liberties Alliance,
was founded with seed money from the oil billionaire Charles #Koch.
In a raft of amicus briefs to the court, alliances of scientists, environmentalists and labor organizations warned that undoing Chevron would roll back a regulatory framework that for four decades has improved the health, safety and welfare of Americans.
It would also unravel efforts to protect the environment and fight the climate crisis.

Elena #Kagan issued a withering dissent, which was joined by her fellow liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
She accused her rightwing peers on the bench of throwing out a precedent that had stood for 40 years as “a cornerstone of administrative law”.
Chevron had been applied over that period in thousands of judicial decisions and become “part of the warp and woof of modern government”, said Kagan.
By casting out decades of settled law, the conservative supermajority had once again asserted their authority.m

“The majority disdains restraint, and grasps for power,” Kagan added.
The ruling was widely denounced by liberal observers. Elizabeth #Warren, the US senator from Massachusetts, said it was a “power grab by the far right to benefit the wealthy and well-connected”.
Laurence #Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard law school, said on social media:
“The administrative state just died. The imperial judiciary” has “relegated Congress to a secondary role”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/jun/28/us-supreme-court-chevron-doctrine-ruling?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other