Leah Lippman
Appearances
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
Yeah. So subtitle will kind of give you a sense how the Supreme Court runs on conservative grievance, fringe theories and bad vibes. Basically, how the court is just implementing the worst parts of the Republican Party's platform, targeting different groups that aren't part of the modern Republican coalition and doing so by just declaring their feelings, their hurt feelings, quote, the law.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
So for those of you not watching the video, my eyes are literally bugging out of my face at this point. This is why you should go to Michigan for law school rather than Harvard. Side note. One, the idea that everything is working, the system is working is just so divorced from reality. It is difficult to relay that.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
I mean, even if courts are striking down some of what Trump is doing, the damage he is wreaking on the infrastructure of the federal government is profound. Right. Right. Like scaring away all of these civil servants, letting these doge whatever's like infiltrate the Treasury Department. These are things that have already happened and that courts are not going to be able to claw back.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
And so so that's just like a first step. Now, the idea that Donald Trump is just going to respect all of these court orders aged really well over like seven days, let's say, as his vice president took to the media floating the idea that he had floated four years earlier. Right.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
If you had bothered to be remotely online when he was suggesting that Donald Trump fire every member of the civil servant and basically tell the Supreme Court, you know, you made your decision, try and enforce it. And they are already floating, right, as he did previously, the suggestion that they weren't going to obey various court orders that told them. No, you can't do wildly illegal things.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
So I can't say the system is working super well right now is kind of the TLDR.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
Well, so this isn't even a question about courts being in a position to decide all of the questions in our legal system. It is about the fact that the executive branch is subject to the law. And in these cases, that law is really fucking clear.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
It is directly compelled by the lawmaker in our constitutional system, Congress, who told the executive branch, like, no, you don't just get to not spend whatever money you don't like that we appropriate. Or the Constitution is unusually clear, like in the case of birthright citizenship. So this is an instance where it's not about courts being good or awesome or constitutional caretakers.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
It's just about whether the executive branch is subject to the law. And there are so many foundational court cases that obviously tell presidents to not do things or to do things, right? Like one of the biggest presidential power cases is Case called Youngstown, where the Supreme Court told President Truman, no, you can't just seize the steel mills. And J.D.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
Vance, of course, has been praising Supreme Court decisions that told Democratic presidents they can't do things like, for example, the immunity ruling that let Donald Trump get off scot free for attempting to. a coup first time around.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
He was describing that as a massive win, right, for the rule of law, even though that decision told the executive branch you cannot prosecute a former president for official acts. So he knows, right, this is horseshit. And yes, right, it is wildly inconsistent with basic premises of our constitutional system.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
Yeah. So a few things. I don't think it is going to hit well with those guys. And it's not going to hit well for any number of reasons. One is that J.D. Vance is essentially claiming the power not just of Congress, right, to make laws, defies laws, but here the power of the courts, right, to – Again, enforce laws that Congress has made.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
And these guys on the Supreme Court, they are judicial supremacists, right? Like they think they have the power to decide all things. And so having some weird dweeb like J.D. Vance tell them, right, like, no, you don't actually get to have your fingers in all the cookie jars is not going to go over well with them. And so I don't think they are going to be cool with this.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
And there are going to be certain cases where, again, the law is just sufficiently clear, whether we're talking about federal statutes or the Constitution. And what the Trump administration is trying to do is just – wildly destabilizing in other ways, like where you had the executive branch saying we're not actually going to spend federal money that Congress has appropriated.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
Like that's horrible for the rule of law, like even for finance bros. Like it's bad when the federal government doesn't pay out money that Congress said it would. So it's not even like this is a big conflict of interest for them when they're thinking about rule of law and like my rich friends. Right.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
Yeah. So the legal process is proceeding differently, I think, in at least two ways. One is the legal system is attempting to deal with something that is in many ways unprecedented, like the systematic unconstitutional and illegal acts that this administration is doing. And so they are trying to craft these orders differently.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
Quickly, because what they are doing, if allowed to go into effect, is just going to have these immediate profound consequences that would be difficult to reverse. And so they are being forced to proceed on a pace that is a little bit different than the average legal process and at a volume that, again, is a little bit different.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
And yes, they are figuring out exactly the scope of their orders that they are having to do on a pretty tight timeline that isn't usual for courts. And that's because the administration put them in this position. And so I do not take what the administration is telling courts or doing in courts to evince a position that they think they can deny court orders. They are not telling courts that.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
They are saying they are in compliance. And all of the litigation and disagreement is about what exactly these orders require right now and how courts should modify them. The other conversation is happening more in the public sphere and political sphere. And of course, that's a huge warning sign because who knows whether it will sift into the former.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
But it does seem like at least for now, right, they are not adopting the express position that like, fuck it, let's just do it and be legends. And that's something.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
They can do an immense amount. And that's part of why I just went ballistic when you read the title of the op ed that talked about the system working, because even if, again, courts are striking down everything that is illegal, even if the executive branch adheres to all of those decisions, there are still many, many things they can do to hollow out the federal bureaucracy. Right. Like if they.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
put all of these administrators on leave. If they say, we're just not going to bring any new cases under the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, they are just going to allow consumer fraud to run rampant. They're going to cause people to leave the administration and administrative state. And it is impossible to quickly build back up that infrastructure
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
And so that's part of why we are in a constitutional crisis, whether or not the executive branch refuses to comply with court orders, because they are using their power to basically undermine our system of government, our system of laws, trying to do it in any number of ways, some of which might be legal, some of which might be not, some of which courts are going to be able to stop, and some of which
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
Courts aren't. And inevitably, when courts strike some of the more outlandish, obviously illegal policies down, I worry that that is going to give the administration cover and the courts cover to let other things through because it is going to present a facade of the system working. Right.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
And the court will look like an independent check on an executive branch that, again, even if it respects court orders, is not. acting in ways that are absolutely antithetical to a functioning constitutional democracy and the rule of law.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
Right, exactly. So if, for example, there's some uncertainty about whether the federal government is actually going to give out these payments, there are some organizations that run on a paycheck-to-paycheck, disbursement-to-disbursement basis. People's health care will be interrupted. Child care is going to be disrupted.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
And even if a court stops that later, that is not going to undo the immense harm that people will already have experienced and that the administration is already going to be unleashing on all of us.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
Yeah. So I think those might be two areas where the court's views could diverge, because I think the Republican justices have evinced the view that presidents, in their view, should have the power to fire most people kind of within the executive branch or at least a lot of people. And so even though the law is right now that Congress can protect civil servants, the civil service,
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
They can say the heads of the Federal Trade Commission and whatnot can't be fired without good cause. There is a decent chance that the Supreme Court will overrule those cases and change the law to allow Donald Trump to exert more control over the federal bureaucracy.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
Now, on the issue of spending, I think that that is an instance where the court or at least a majority of the justices are probably going to say, no, presidents don't have the unilateral power, right, just to decline to spend money that Congress has appropriated. The constitutional text is clear, right? Congress has the power of the purse, right? This is not ambiguous.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
This is also clear from federal law, you know, after Richard Nixon attempted to impound federal funds that Congress had appropriated. Congress wrote a law being like, no, knock it off. You can't do that. So these things are all pretty clear. And so I think those might be two spaces where the court diverges.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
And again, that gets back to your point where that still gives the executive branch an awful lot of power to unleash a lot of havoc because the If they replace the civil service, civil servants, with a bunch of 19-year-old douchebags and whatever else they're planning, the operation of the federal government is going to be vastly undermined.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
Yes. So a few things. There are some things that they can do, right? They can try to hold officials in contempt. That involves basically sending out the U.S. Marshals, right, to haul these people, you know, before the court and potentially in jail. A slight problem with that is who controls the U.S. Marshals, right, the executive branch.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
Second is I think they can hope and I think that they should hope that there are enough people in Congress and elsewhere who would be so horrified by the idea that the executive branch would not comply with an order telling the executive branch right just to comply with the law that this could actually lead to a fissure, you know, within the Republican coalition and lead to some internal checks within the Republican Party, which seem to be, you know,
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
the only or a particularly important mechanism of pushing back on Donald Trump. And so those are some possibilities. But I think it is a very real risk that the court is going to look at all these cases and wonder which ones is he not going to listen to us on.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
And in fact, like if you go back to one of the very earliest, most foundational constitutional cases, Marbury versus Madison, right, that is the case where the Supreme Court said we can declare an act of Congress unconstitutional and decline to enforce a federal law. the federal government, they didn't even show up at the Supreme Court to defend their position.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
And Chief Justice Marshall and the other justices were rightfully wary about whether the executive branch would comply with the decision. And so he kind of wrote it such that he didn't actually require the executive branch to do much at all, even in the course of reaffirming the court's power. And so I think what you are positing is a very real concern that the Supreme Court is going to be
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
worried about whether this executive branch is going to comply with all of their court orders. And so maybe they would budget their capital or at least ask, you know, on what issues would a decision, you know, striking down what the administration has done, allow us to kind of be aligned with, let's say, Republican senators or super majority of the American people.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
And maybe, you know, that is an issue or a lens that they are approaching these cases with.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
Yeah. So it's so weird there isn't a deal because we were told Donald Trump is the consummate dealmaker. Best dealmaker. So I actually think that example is a little bit different than the worst case scenario we were talking about, because the Supreme Court in that decision, what they said is this law is constitutional. Right.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
They did not purport to require the president to do something or prohibit the president from doing something. And so the president is not technically in violation of the court order. Now, what he is in violation of is the federal law itself. Right. What Congress has said. And that's going back to what I was suggesting earlier, like that, too, is a constitutional crisis.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
Like presidents do not have the power just to say that federal law is optional. Right. Like no one has to listen to that one. Right. That's a problem, too. Right. But it's a little bit different than the situation we're imagining, which is whether he would actually defy a court order.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
So the Department of Justice is reportedly instituting these loyalty tests, asking people, do you believe the 2020 election is stolen and whatnot, and using that as kind of litmus tests. And I think it is extremely dangerous to have a federal law enforcement apparatus that is all loyalists. Right.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
No people who are going to provide any measure of dissent or counter views or any sort of independent views. And again, I think you just have to look at how the federal government has been operating until now and what they are doing with the Doge Bros. Right. Like, do you want them to be able to replace the people who have insured your Medicare payments? Right.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
are issued, the people who are ensuring that the Medicaid system is functioning, the people who are ensuring that child care centers get the support that they need, the people who are ensuring that student loan payments actually are forgiven, like we're allowed, the people who are ensuring you can actually pay your taxes online. Those are things that federal bureaucrats do.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
And if you replace all of those people with a bunch of hacks who don't believe in government and are like freshmen at Northeastern who go by big balls, those things are not going to get done. When people who are 18, they can't even get up at 8 a.m. in the morning. These are not the people that you want running the basic services that allow all of us to function and live our lives.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
Yes, indeed. You might wonder that. And, you know, that's part of what we are seeing, right, and worried about when you look at what Doge and they are doing as far as, you know, whittling down parts of the federal government. They have disbanded, you know, portions of the Department of Justice that were designed to go after Russian oligarchs, right? They have disbanded, right, parts of
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
the Department of Justice that were designed to go after major corruption. And, you know, they are suspending investigations into, for example, like what Elon Musk is up to at like SpaceX and his other companies. So, yes, right. Again, if you put in a bunch of hack loyalists into the federal government, they are not going to be applying the laws equally.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
They are not going to be providing benefits equally. And that, too, is, again, just antithetical to how our system is supposed to work.
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Will Trump Defy the Courts?
It was, and yet I am choosing to take a longer view of this because one of the last people Taylor Swift got into a major feud with was Kanye West. How's he doing now? He had a tough weekend. Exactly. I'm just waiting for her to pull a Kendrick Lamar