Leaning Into Lawlessness
Donald Trump is refusing to follow laws he doesn't like. The courts and Congress are pushing back.
It took until July 2017 for the first article of impeachment to be filed against the then-first-term President, Donald Trump. On July 12, 2017, Reps. Brad Sherman (D-CA) and Al Green (D-TX) joined forces to introduce an article of impeachment based on Obstruction of Justice related to Trump’s acceptance of election interference from Russia and his firing of former FBI Director James Comey.
Sherman and Green were first movers, but because the Democrats were in the minority, the impeachment went nowhere. But they were certainly prescient, as Trump would go on to be impeached by the Democratic House twice, once in 2019 over Trump’s attempted shakedown of President Zelenskyy for dirt on Joe Biden and then in 2021 for inciting the Capitol riot.
Now, barely two weeks into Trump’s second term, a new push from the minority is underway, this time led again by Rep. Green who stood on the House floor on Wednesday to speak out against Trump’s scheme to “own” and “take over” Gaza and to announce his intention to file new impeachment articles against the president.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. and injustice in Gaza is a threat to justice in the United States of America."
"I rise to announce that the movement to impeach the president has begun. I rise to announce that I will bring articles of impeachment against the president for dastardly deeds proposed and dastardly deeds done."
We saw where Trump’s first-term impeachments went, of course: acquittals in both Senate trials thanks to a cowardly Republican Party. It would be naive to think that if Democrats retook Congress in next year’s midterms and impeached him again, the result would somehow be different. But the speed with which Green announced his intention to file impeachment articles this time around is a stark indication of the ramped-up stakes in this new Trump era and the increased threat that Trump poses to the rule of law.
If Trump’s first term was largely about shattering norms, his second is so far about blatantly shattering legal guardrails. For Trump, as Philip Bump of The Washington Post puts it:
Violations of legal and precedential boundaries are about proving that no one can police the president, as much as revealing that no one can.
Or put another way, as Nixon said:
"Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."
And why wouldn’t Trump lean into lawlessness? He’s already learned there will be few if any consequences for his actions and that simply being president can wipe away any past crimes. Moreover, he now has immunity for “official” actions taken as President thanks to his buddies on the Supreme Court.
So much has happened in the first 17 days of Trump’s second term already, it’s hard to focus on the most deplorable. That of course is his entire M.O. So in today’s piece, I’ll take a look at a few of the most egregious of Trump’s illegal orders and discuss what is being done to resist and block those actions.
Trump’s Crimes And Misdemeanors
To be an impeachable offense, or a “high crime” as the constitution puts it, an action need not technically be against the law. Trump and his team love to traffic in those legal gray areas, exploiting every ambiguity and nuance to their benefit. But it’s telling that the first article of impeachment to be filed against Trump this term is for his disastrous proposal to occupy Gaza and displace millions of its residents. Were Trump to put this plan into effect, it would constitute multiple crimes, as Amnesty International explains:
Any plan to forcibly deport Palestinians outside the occupied territory against their will is a war crime, and when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack on the civilian population, it would constitute a crime against humanity.
— Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General
In the wake of pushback, even from MAGA voters, Trump has begun to walk that Gaza proposal back a bit. But it’s still just one of the many illegal or unconstitutional actions Trump has proposed or undertaken.
At his substack Taking Down Trump, attorney Tristan Snell compiled an exhaustive list of 23 “potential illegalities” from Trump’s first 16 days in office. And it’s a good place to start.
Let’s dive into a few of these.
The Impounding Of Congressionally Authorized Spending
Last week, the Trump administration issued a memo that sought to freeze all federal grants and assistance through an impoundment of already appropriated funds, which could amount to as much as $3 trillion in assistance.
The administration claimed the freeze would have been only temporary in order for the Office of Management and Budget to determine whether federal spending is in compliance with Trump’s policies. The order was immediately stayed, however, by multiple judges so that those funds could be distributed in a timely fashion beyond the administration’s Tuesday deadline.
Per Bloomberg, Judge Loren AliKhan, a Biden appointee, shot down the notion that the freeze wouldn’t cause irreparable harm, as Trump’s team tried to argue.
The judge
said in a 30-page written ruling that if OMB intended to conduct an “exhaustive review” of what programs should or shouldn’t be funded, it could be carried out “without depriving millions of Americans access to vital resources.”
“As defendants themselves admit, the memorandum implicated as much as $3 trillion in financial assistance,” the judge said. “That is a breathtakingly large sum of money to suspend practically overnight.”
Democrats will likely not be able to block confirmation of Trump’s pick for Office of Management and Budget Director, Russell Vought, who masterminded this spending freeze as well as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Nevertheless, Senate Democrats spent all Wednesday night on the floor speaking out against Vought in protest of the OMB’s maneuver.
Senator Brian Schatz laid out the importance of using the 30 hours of debate time they get ahead of Vought’s confirmation vote to push back against the nomination:
Republicans in the meantime are vowing to push Vought through in a confirmation vote tonight, so send a message to your Senator to urge them to vote No.
The Dismantling Of An Entire Agency
USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, was established by John F. Kennedy in 1961 to serve as the U.S. government’s global humanitarian arm, distributing billions of dollars each year to, as CNN puts it:
alleviate poverty, treat diseases, and respond to famines and natural disasters. It also promotes democracy building and development by supporting non-government organizations, independent media and social initiatives.
It’s no wonder then that Donald Trump reportedly told Elon Musk to “shut it down.”
Trump first laid the foundation for dismantling the agency with a day-one executive order that froze all foreign aid for 90 days. In response, Democrats immediately called out the illegality of such an order.
Democratic Reps. Gregory Meeks of New York and Lois Frankel of Florida said in a Friday letter to Rubio that programs that appear affected by the freeze such as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) “depend on an uninterrupted supply of medicines.” PEPFAR and PMI were launched by Republican President George W. Bush and have long enjoyed bipartisan support….
“Congress has appropriated and cleared these funds for use, and it is our constitutional duty to make sure these funds are spent as directed,” the letter read. “These funds respond directly to your stated challenge of carrying out a foreign policy that makes the United States stronger, safer, and more prosperous.”
As a result, the administration issued a broad waiver exempting “life-saving humanitarian assistance programs” from the freeze.
But the chipping away at USAID did not end there. Last week, 60 USAID staff were put on leave after accusations that they were trying to circumvent the 90-day freeze. Then on Saturday, “two top security officials at USAID were put on administrative leave…for refusing members of the Department of Government Efficiency access to systems at the agency.”
Musk and his DOGE wrecking crew ultimately gained access to USAID headquarters and possibly illegally gained access to classified data.
Senate Democrats on the Foreign Relations Committee fired back, asserting their constitutional role related to any agency formed by Congress.
In a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio Sunday, Democratic members of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee requested “an immediate update about the access of USAID’s headquarters, including whether the individuals who accessed the headquarters were authorized to be there and by whom.”
“The potential access of sensitive, even classified, files, which may include the personally identifiable information (PII) of Americans working with USAID, and this incident as a whole, raises deep concerns about the protection and safeguarding of matters related to U.S. national security,” the letter said.
The Senators also wrote that “any effort to merge or fold USAID into the Department of State should be, and by law must be, previewed, discussed and approved by Congress.
By Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced USAID had been folded into the State Department and offered a softer tone on the agency takeover than Musk (who called it a “criminal organization” that “needed to die”) or Trump (who called USAID “full of radical left-wing lunatics.”)
Regardless of Rubio’s pledges to thoughtfully reevaluate US AID’s funding priorities, lawsuits over the dismantling of the agency are expected to be filed by nonprofits, contractors, and employees, given that this unilateral unraveling of a federal agency is illegal on its face.
The nonprofit groups are expected to claim, among other things, that the government has violated the Administrative Procedure Act, a law that requires agencies to follow the correct legal procedures before making decisions, a lawyer involved in strategic talks said.
An action that courts deem to be "arbitrary and capricious" under that law can be set aside.
Plaintiffs could also question the legal authority of Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency and allege that the administration is unlawfully withholding funds appropriated by Congress.
The Dismissal Of Independent Watchdogs
On Friday, Donald Trump fired 18 inspectors general across various government agencies including the defense, energy, and state departments, without any notice. The move, straight out of the Project 2025 playbook, is a blatant flouting of a 2022 federal statute requiring 30 days notice to dismiss inspectors general, a requirement put in place after Trump’s first term in which he sought to replace IGs exercising independent oversight with political lackeys.
The original law that established inspectors general as independent watchdogs with oversight over government operations, The Inspector General Act of 1978, was passed unanimously through the U.S. Senate as part of the post-Watergate reforms and was broadly supported by Republicans who wanted to root out government “waste, fraud and abuse.”
Oh, the irony.
One of the fired IGs, Mike Ware spoke out against the move and explained why it is so dangerous.
“This is not about any of our individual jobs. We acknowledge that the president has the right to remove any of us that he chooses. But the protections that were baked into the act is everything, absent having to provide a real reason. We’re looking at what amounts to a threat to democracy, a threat to independent oversight, and a threat to transparency in government.”
As former Obama ethics lawyer Norm Eisen puts it:
“The definition of dictatorship is making your own whims the law and Trump’s actions here are blatantly illegal … Trump is flouting the statutory requirements to test just how far he can push the limits because, plain and simple, he doesn’t want the oversight that IGs provide.”
When he was asked about the move this past weekend, Senator Lindsey Graham’s response was…telling.
Pretty much sums up Congressional Republicans’ complete surrender to Trump right there.
As we are reminded often, neither Trump nor Musk—let alone Congressional Republicans—is deterred by laws that prohibit the very actions they undertake. In a move that Orwell would admire, Trump and Musk simply declare any law they don’t like “unconstitutional,” asserting their own righteousness in their effort to undermine whatever their villain du jour is: the “deep state,” “big government,” “DEI.”
The most surreal example of this was Trump’s executive order overturning birthright citizenship, a right that is literally spelled out in the U.S. Constitution. Karoline Leavitt even declared from the podium that “this administration believes that birthright citizenship is unconstitutional.”
Quite a flex from those who so fervently declare themselves to be for “law and order” and the “Constitution.” But in an age when the U.S. Supreme Court majority has no qualms about overturning its own precedents in the service of Trump’s ideological crusade, Trump and Musk are queuing this up for the conservatives on the Court.
The good news is that a federal judge yesterday issued a nationwide preliminary injunction against the order, meaning that the order is blocked from going into effect pending appeal by the Trump administration (a prior temporary stay was set to expire today.).
U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman said no court in the country has endorsed the Trump administration’s interpretation of the 14th Amendment.
“This court will not be the first,” she said.
She added: “Citizenship is a most precious right, expressly granted by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.”
As we saw during the first Trump administration, until Democrats retake control of Congress, hopefully in 2027, the courts are going to provide the most important guardrails against Trump’s overreach and his attempt to consolidate power in the hands of the executive.
And with so many Biden appointees ruling against the Trump administration in this moment, we’re reminded of the importance of the push made by President Biden and Senate Democrats to fill the judiciary with pro-democracy and pro-constitution judges, a preemptive resistance that is bearing fruit today.
They sent him to military school to get him under control but it clearly had no effect. He is as out of control as ever and we will pay the price for it.
IMPEACH the orange rapist! This will get his many, many offenses on the record. I will call my reps & senators--it matters; they definitely tally all the calls & emails. Blaming Biden for the world's ills is misguided and clearly tRump is MUCH worse. And Musk must also be stopped--noone elected him.