Democrats have no power in the federal government as Republicans control the White House, Senate and House of Representatives, so they have resorted to desperate measures to stop President Donald Trump’s agenda.
The Democratic Party and its surrogates have resorted to using the courts and activist judges to place holds and freezes on policies that the president wants to enact, but it may ultimately backfire on them, some legal experts said to The Daily Caller.
“Ironically, in rushing to trip up Trump, these judges may empower him when all is said and done,” GianCarlo Canaparo, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, said.
He told The Caller that, in some cases, the judges have “gotten the law and their own power terribly wrong.”
“Not only do I expect they will ultimately be reversed on appeal, but by overreaching, they have given Trump exactly the vehicles he wants to overrule some of those old Supreme Court precedents,” he said. “And, of course, they’ve teed up a challenge to nationwide injunctions, which the Supreme Court seems ready to abolish.”
In Maryland, one judge halted a Trump directive to deny federal funds to hospitals that perform transgender procedures to minors.
A Washington D.C. federal judge put the brakes on the president’s plan to halt foreign government grants and contracts that were issued before he became president.
But in one victory last week another federal judge lifted the freeze on Trump’s buyout offer to federal workers.
The anti-administration rulings, though, led White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt to scold the judges and claim that it was not Trump who was causing a “constitutional crisis,” as Democrats claimed last week.
“The real crisis is taking place within our judiciary, where activist judges are abusing their power to unilaterally block the President’s basic executive authority and thwart the will of the people,” she said.
“President Trump is acting fully within his Article II powers with these executive orders,” Article III Project founder Mike Davis said to The Caller. “Activist judges are attempting to steal his executive power over nothing more than political differences. This is unacceptable, and these activist judges are creating a constitutional crisis. If it comes to the Supreme Court to put an end to this, then so be it.”
Harvard law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen said in a piece for The New Yorker that the president likely knew he would get sued on his orders and had the intention of getting the cases to the Supreme Court to be adjudicated.
“This makes Trump’s legal strategy intelligible,” she said.
“[W]hat is playing out through a veneer of chaos is a deliberate and organized tactical program to undertake actions that provoke a raft of lawsuits, some of which could become good vehicles for establishing a constitutional vision in which the President has sole authority over the entire executive branch,” she said.
Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris also told Democrat Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin that the Trump Department of Justice is looking to change a near-century-old precedent set by the Supreme Court that stops a president from removing heads of agencies with no cause.
“To the extent that Humphrey’s Executor requires otherwise, the Department intends to urge the Supreme Court to overrule that decision, which prevents the President from adequately supervising principal officers in the Executive Branch who execute the laws on the President’s behalf, and which has already been severely eroded by recent Supreme Court decisions,” she said.
It came after a judge ordered Office of Special Counsel leader Hampton Dellinger to be reinstated after President Trump fired him.
“The Constitution vests the executive power in the president, and all of it must be accountable to the voters through him. That said, the president should also work with allies in Congress to get Congress to take back the legislative power that it has delegated to the executive. The president should not be our chief lawmaker, but he is our chief executive,” Canaparo said to The Caller. “That’s a very important distinction that the Founders appreciated, but we have forgotten.”
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