US supreme court

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Chief justice rebukes Trump for call to impeach judge hearing deportation case

      by

      John Roberts, the chief justice of the US supreme court, delivered a rare rebuke on Tuesday of Donald Trump after the US president demanded the impeachment of a federal judge who had issued an adverse ruling against the administration blocking the deportation of hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members.“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said in a statement. “The normal appellate process exists for that purpose.”The statement came hours after Trump assailed the chief US district judge in Washington DC, James Boasberg, for issuing a temporary restraining order halting deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 that gives the president the power to conduct removals without due process.“This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” Trump wrote about Boasberg, labelling him a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge” and a “troublemaker”.View image in fullscreenTrump’s personal attack against Boasberg reflected his broader resentment at being increasingly constrained in recent weeks by court orders he believes are wrong, and his frustration at having his signature deportation policy be halted while subject to legal scrutiny.It also followed the administration’s attempt to have Boasberg thrown off the case, complaining in a letter to the clerk of the US court of appeals for the DC circuit – a bizarre way to force a recusal – on grounds that he had overreached by improperly turning the matter into a class-action lawsuit.According to the statute, the Alien Enemies Act can be invoked in the event of war, which only Congress can declare under the US constitution, or in the event of “predatory incursions” by state actors that amount to an invasion.The Trump administration’s use of the law rests on the second clause concerning incursions. In court filings, the administration has said Trump determined that the US was being invaded by members of the Tren de Aragua gang in Venezuela, which acted as a proxy for the Venezuelan government.Trump has the power as president to declare an incursion under the Alien Enemies Act, the filing said, and his decision was unreviewable by the courts following the US supreme court’s 1948 decision in Ludecke v Watkins, which said that whether someone was an enemy alien was up to the president.But Trump and his political allies appeared to have conflated two issues; federal courts can still review whether Trump satisfied the conditions to declare an incursion under the Alien Enemies Act in the first instance.The problem for the Trump administration is that in deciding Boasberg’s injunction blocking the deportation flights was unlawful, they ignored a verbal order from the judge at an emergency hearing on Saturday to turn around any deportation flights that had already departed.That opened a second legal battle for the administration where the justice department was left to argue at a hearing on Monday that the orders had been unclear and that, in any event, Boasberg’s authority to compel the planes to return vanished the moment they left US airspace.The extraordinary defenses by the administration suggested the White House took advantage of its own perceived uncertainty to do as it pleased, testing the limits of the judicial system to hold to account government officials set on circumventing adverse rulings.At the hearing, the administration claimed it did not follow Boasberg’s verbal instruction to turn around planes that had already departed, because it had not been repeated in the written injunction he issued at 7.25pm ET on Saturday.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Oral statements are not injunctions and the written orders always supersede whatever may have been stated in the record,” Abhishek Kambli, the deputy assistant attorney general for the justice department’s civil division, argued for the administration.The judge appeared unimpressed by that contention. “You felt that you could disregard it because it wasn’t in the written order. That’s your first argument? The idea that because my written order was pithier so it could be disregarded – that’s one heck of a stretch,” Boasberg said.Kambli also suggested that even if Boasberg had included the directive in his written injunction, by the time he issued the temporary restraining order the deportation flights had been outside the judge’s jurisdiction.Boasberg expressed incredulity at that argument, too, explaining that federal judges still have authority over US government officials who make the decisions about the planes and that he had had the authority to order their return, even if the planes had been outside US airspace.The Trump administration opened a third legal front in the Alien Enemies Act case, after it asked Boasberg in a late-night 35-page filing on Monday to dissolve the injunctions and dismiss the case.The administration is currently subject to two injunctions: one order preventing the deportation of five Venezuelans who filed the initial suit challenging the use of the Alien Enemies Act, and a second order from Boasberg that expanded the initial order to cover anyone being removed under the Alien Enemies Act.Administration lawyers affirmed in a separate filing on Tuesday that no deportation flights had departed the US after Boasberg’s written injunction had been issued on Saturday evening. Two flights took off before his 7.25pm ET order. One flight took off after, but that plane carried immigrants who were being deported under a different authority from the Alien Enemies Act. More

    • 175 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘She is evil’: Amy Coney Barrett under attack by right wing after USAid ruling

      by

      Amy Coney Barrett, the Donald Trump-appointed conservative supreme court justice, has been branded a “DEI judge” by furious rightwing figures, after she voted to reject Trump’s attempt to freeze nearly $2bn in foreign aid.Coney Barrett, part of the court’s rightwing majority, split with her fellow conservative justices this week. She and John Roberts, the chief justice, voted to leave in place a ruling from a US district judge that ordered the Trump administration to unfreeze the nearly $2bn in aid for foreign aid work that had already been performed, and that had been approved by Congress.The reaction from pro-Trump rightwing commentators and activists was swift.“She is evil, chosen solely because she checked identity politics boxes. Another DEI hire. It always ends badly,” Mike Cernovich, a prominent rightwing influencer and conspiracy theorist, wrote on X, referencing diversity, equity and inclusion policies, which Republicans have demonized.Fox News host Mark Levin claimed in an online post that Barrett had “deceived people into thinking she was a reliable constitutionalist”. He added: “The power has gone to her head. It happens with frightening regularity the last half-century.”Laura Loomer, the rightwing activist who repeatedly traveled with Trump during his 2024 campaign, went even further. She posted a picture of Coney Barrett’s family, which includes two adopted Black children, and wrote: “Amy Coney Barrett was a DEI appointee.” Jack Posobiec, a popular Maga figure with more than 3m followers on X, posted that Coney Barrett was a “DEI judge”.Mike Davis, who was involved in the effort to confirm Trump nominees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the supreme court, appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast to add his voice to the criticism.“She’s a rattled law professor with her head up her ass,” Davis said of Coney Barrett.He added: “As we work with the Trump 47 administration on the next supreme court list, we’re going to be looking for more bold, more fearless, less DEI, and people who are going to be more of a sure bet.”The branding of Coney Barrett as a liberal judicial figure will come as a surprise to those familiar with her work and legal history.Her appointment to the supreme court in October 2020 cemented the court’s 6-3 conservative majority, and she voted to overturn Roe v Wade, which established the right to abortion in the US, in 2022. An analysis by the Empirical Scotus website found that Barrett voted with Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito – the court’s two most conservative justices – more than 80% of the time in 2023.However, before the vote to reject Trump’s attempt to withhold aid, she had sided with liberal justices to deny Trump’s request to delay sentencing in his New York hush-money case, and joined a dissent against a conservative-led decision that weakened rules on the discharge of raw sewage. More

    • 225 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Will Trump put a Fox News host on the US supreme court? Mark Tushnet can’t rule it out

      by

      Should Donald Trump get the chance to nominate a new justice to the supreme court, to join the three rightwingers he installed in his first term, he might pick “the equivalent of Pete Hegseth”, Mark Tushnet said, referring to the Fox News host who is now US secretary of defense.“Trump as a person has his idiosyncrasies, I’ll put it that way,” Tushnet said, from Harvard, where he is William Nelson Cromwell professor of law, emeritus. “And … I have thought about potential Trump nominees, and actually, what comes to mind is the equivalent of Pete Hegseth: a Fox News legal commentator.”Justice Jeanine Pirro? It’s a thought. Perhaps future historians will debate “The Box of Wine that Saved Nine”. Perhaps not.“I wouldn’t rule it out,” Tushnet said, of his Fox News theory, if not of Pirro, per se. “I don’t think it’s highly likely, but given the way those things work, and given the idea that you want people who aren’t simply judges, it’s not a lunatic thought, I guess.”The reference to “people who aren’t simply judges” is to arguments laid out in Tushnet’s new book, Who Am I to Judge?, in which he makes his case against the prevalence of judicial theories, particularly originalism, to which conservatives adhere, and calls for a rethink of how justices are selected.Tushnet is a liberal voice. Provocatively, he writes that Amy Coney Barrett, the third Trump justice who in 2022 helped remove the federal right to abortion, at least has a hinterland different from most court picks, as a member of People of Praise, a hardline Catholic sect.“I think her involvement in that group has exposed her to a much wider range of human experience than John Roberts’s background, for example,” Tushnet said, referring to the chief justice who was a Reagan White House aide and a federal judge. “And so if you’re looking for people who have been exposed to human experience across the board, I think she’s a reasonable candidate for that.”View image in fullscreenConey Barrett cemented the 6-3 rightwing majority that has given Trump wins including rejecting attempts to exclude him from the ballot for inciting an insurrection and ruling that presidents have some legal immunity. Now, as Trump appears to imagine himself a king and oversees an authoritarian assault on the federal government, reading Tushnet and talking to him generates a sort of grim humor.Looking ahead, to when Trump’s executive orders might land before the justices, Tushnet suggests “the court will put … speed bumps in the way of the administration. They won’t say: ‘Absolutely you can’t do it,’ except the birthright citizenship order.”That order, signed on Trump’s first day back in power, seeks to end the right to citizenship for all children born on American soil and subject to US jurisdiction, as guaranteed under the 14th amendment since 1868.On 23 January, a federal judge said Trump’s order was so “blatantly unconstitutional” that it “boggled” his mind. Should it reach the supreme court, Tushnet can see the rightwing justices “saying: ‘Look, yeah, if you want to do this, we’re not saying you can, but if you want to do it, you got to get Congress to go along. You can’t just do it on your own.’ So that would be a speed bump.”That said, Tushnet sometimes thinks “about how in the US, there are these traffic-calming measures that are literally speed bumps but sometimes, if you go over too fast, you fly”. Trump, he said, has licensed rightwing justices to take decisions that “may not count as speed bumps if you fly off them”.Tushnet was happy to answer a question he thinks all supreme court nominees should be asked: what’s your favorite book and favorite movie?Tushnet’s favorites are Middlemarch by George Eliot and Heaven, a 2002 film directed by Tom Tykwer from a script co-written by Krzysztof Kieślowski. He wrote his book containing such questions, he said, “because I had this longstanding sense that the [supreme court] nomination process has gotten off the rails, mostly by focusing exclusively on judges as potential nominees, and secondarily by focusing on constitutional theory.“For the past 20 years, the court … has been dominated by people whose background was as judges or appellate advocates, and historically that was quite unusual. There are always some judges but there always had been people with much broader kinds of experience, including a former president, William H Taft [chief justice between 1921 and 1930], and several candidates for the presidency, including Charles Evans Hughes [1916], Earl Warren [a vice-presidential pick in 1948], senators like Hugo Black. And those people had disappeared from consideration for the court, and that seemed to be a bad idea.”Tushnet describes a “political reconstitution of the nomination process provoked in large measure by the Republican reaction to the Warren court”, which sat from 1953 to 1969, the era of great civil rights reforms.“I think their view was the Warren court was not composed of judges, they were politicians, some called them ‘politicians in robes’, and Republicans sort of thought the way to get away from the substantive jurisprudence of the Warren court was to put judges on the court, rather than people with what I call broad experience,” Tushnet said.One justice on the current court was not previously a judge: Elena Kagan, one of the three besieged liberals, was dean of Harvard Law School, then solicitor general under Barack Obama.Tushnet “went into the project thinking that I would find more great justices who had been a politician than I actually did. When I was teaching, I would do this thing about who the justices were who decided Brown v Board of Education”, the 1954 ruling that ended segregation in public schools, “and I think it’s fair to say that not one of them’s primary prior experience was as a judge, and like seven or eight of their prior primary experiences were as a politician. And if Brown v Board is the premier achievement of the supreme court, the fact that it was decided by a court primarily made up of politicians counts in favor of thinking about politicians when appointing to the court.”“Why not do it? For me, the main feature of having been a politician is not that you’ve taken stances aligned with one or another political party at the time, but that you’ve provided reasons in many different ways, you’ve grown up amongst people with a wide range of life experiences that you’ve had to think about, as a politician, in order to get their votes, in order to get your way,” he said.Tushnet’s ideal might be Charles Evans Hughes, an associate justice from 1910 to 1916 and chief justice between 1930 and 1941, but also governor of New York, Republican candidate for president and US secretary of state.On the page, Tushnet imagines asking Hughes a question – “What constitutional theories do you use?” – and getting an appealing answer: “I try to interpret the constitution to make it a suitable instrument for governance in today’s United States.”Tushnet says modern judges and justices should say the same, rather than reach for judicial theories. His new book is in part an answer to a demolition of originalism by Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley law school: “I distinguish, I think, more clearly than other people have, including Erwin, between what I call academic originalism and judicial originalism.”Either form of originalism concerns working out what the founders meant when they wrote the constitution, then advocating its application to modern-day questions. Tushnet “think[s] a good chunk of academic originalism is not subject to many of the criticisms that Erwin levels. It’s not perfect but it’s an academic enterprise, and people work out difficulties, and there’s controversy within the camp and so on.View image in fullscreen“Judicial originalism is different because it has a couple of components. One is, we now know it’s quite selective. To get originalism into the TikTok decision, for example, you have to do an enormous amount of work. It’s not impossible, but it’s not an originalist opinion, fundamentally. So [justices are] selectively originalist, or, as my phrase is, opportunistically originalist. They use it when the sources that they’re presented with support conclusions they would want to reach anyway, and the adversary process at the supreme court isn’t a very good way of finding out what they say they’re trying to find out. And so as a judicial enterprise, originalism just doesn’t do what it purports to do.”To Tushnet, the late Antonin Scalia, an arch-conservative and originalist, is “the leading candidate to be placed on a list of great justices” of the past 50 years, “because of his influence and his contributions to the court.“But one bad contribution was his widely admired writing style. Now, writing styles change over time. And having read an enormous number of opinions of the 1930s, I know there’s an improvement in readability since the 1930s. But the idea that [opinions] become more readable, accessible and memorable by including Scalia-like zingers, short phrases that are quotable and memorable, seems to be just a mistake. But he’s very influential, and so people try to emulate him … Justice Kagan does it in a gentler way. I guess my inclination would be to say: ‘If you’re going to do it, do it the way Justice Kagan does, rather than the way Justice Scalia did.’”Tushnet agrees that some of Scalia’s pugilistic spirit seems to have passed into Samuel Alito, the arch-conservative author of the Dobbs v Jackson ruling, which removed abortion rights, if while shedding all vestiges of humor.In his book, Tushnet shows how Alito’s Dobbs ruling contained a clear mistake, the sort of thing that is largely down to the role clerks play in drafting opinions, as Tushnet once did for Thurgood Marshall, the first Black American justice.“Times were quite different then,” Tushnet said. “The year I was there, the court decided 150 cases. Now they’re deciding under 50 a year … the year I was there was the year Roe v Wade was decided [1973, establishing the right to abortion, now lost]. It had been resolved fundamentally the year before, so they were just cleaning things up, but we knew these were consequential decisions.”The court will soon have more consequential decisions to make. In the meantime, talk of a constitutional crisis, of a president defying the courts, grows increasingly heated.“My sense is that we’re not at the crisis point yet,” Tushnet said. “Like many administrations before it, the Trump administration is taking aggressive legal positions, which may or may not be vindicated. If they’re not vindicated, they’re muttering about what they’ll do. That’s happened before.“My favorite example is that in the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt, while a major decision was pending, had his staff prepare two press releases, one saying: ‘Actually the court has upheld our position,’ the other saying: ‘The court mistakenly rejected our position, and we’re going to go ahead with it anyway.’ Now, they didn’t have to issue that press release, because the court went with the administration. But, you know, muttering about resistance is not historically unusual. Resisting would be quite, quite dramatic, but we’re not there yet.”

      Who Am I to Judge? is published by Yale University Press More

    • 200 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump’s firing of watchdog agency chief illegal and would give ‘license to bully officials’, judge rules

      by

      A US judge on Saturday declared president Donald Trump’s firing of the head of a federal watchdog agency illegal in an early test of the scope of presidential power likely to be decided at the US supreme court.US district judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington had previously ruled that Hampton Dellinger, head of the Office of Special Counsel who is responsible for protecting whistleblowers, could remain in his post pending a ruling.Jackson said in her ruling on Saturday that upholding Trump’s ability to fire Dellinger would give him “a constitutional license to bully officials in the executive branch into doing his will”.The justice department filed a notice late on Saturday saying it was appealing against Berman’s ruling to the US court of appeals for the district of Columbia.Dellinger, who was appointed by Democratic president Joe Biden and approved by the Senate to a five-year term last year, said in an email to Reuters he was “grateful to see the court confirm the importance and legality of the job protections Congress afforded my position”.He added his “efforts to protect federal employees generally, and whistleblowers in particular, from unlawful treatment will continue”.Lawyers for the Trump administration have argued that the order keeping Dellinger in place is an encroachment on Trump’s authority over officials serving in his administration.Jackson, who was named to the bench by president Barack Obama, rejected the contention that the statute is unconstitutional, saying the special counsel’s job is to review unethical or unlawful practices directed at federal civil servants and help whistleblowers act without suffering reprisals.“It would be ironic, to say the least, and inimical to the ends furthered by the statute if the special counsel himself could be chilled in his work by fear of arbitrary or partisan removal,” Jackson wrote.The Trump administration previously urged the US supreme court, which has already delayed a ruling in the case, to get involved earlier this week.Trump has sought to rein in the independence of federal agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission and a ruling in Dellinger’s case could help determine the extent of his authority to do so.Jackson said her ruling was “extremely narrow” and did not diminish Trump’s powers. “This is the only single-headed agency left for the courts to consider, and it is unlike any of them,” she wrote.The acting solicitor general, Sarah Harris, said earlier that Dellinger’s continued work as special counsel was harming the Trump administration, pointing to Dellinger’s role on Tuesday in halting the firing of six probationary government workers the administration had sought to dismiss. More

    • 163 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      US supreme court temporarily blocks firing of head of federal whistleblower protection office

      by

      The US supreme court on Friday temporarily kept on the job the head of the federal agency that protects government whistleblowers, in its first word on the many legal fights over the agenda of Donald Trump’s second presidency.The justices said in an unsigned order that Hampton Dellinger, head of the office of special counsel, could remain in his job at least until Wednesday. That’s when a lower-court order temporarily protecting him expires.With a bare majority of five justices, the high court neither granted nor rejected the administration’s plea to immediately remove him. Instead, the court held the request in abeyance, noting that the order expires in just a few days.US district judge Amy Berman Jackson has scheduled a Wednesday hearing over whether to extend her order keeping Dellinger at his post. The justices could return to the case depending on what she decides.Conservative justices Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito sided with the Trump administration, doubting whether courts have the authority to restore to office someone the president has fired. Acknowledging that some presidentially appointed officials have contested their removal, Gorsuch wrote that “those officials have generally sought remedies like backpay, not injunctive relief like reinstatement”.Liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson would have rejected the administration’s request.The conservative-dominated court has previously taken a robust view of presidential power, including in last year’s decision that gave presidents immunity from prosecution for actions they take in office.The justice department employed sweeping language in urging the court to allow the termination of the head of an obscure federal agency with limited power. Acting solicitor general Sarah Harris wrote in court papers that the lower court had crossed “a constitutional red line” by blocking Dellinger’s firing and stopping Trump “from shaping the agenda of an executive-branch agency in the new administration’s critical first days”.The office of special counsel (OSC) is responsible for guarding the federal workforce from illegal personnel actions, such as retaliation for whistleblowing. Its leader “may be removed by the president only for inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office”.Dellinger was appointed by Joe Biden – who ended Trump’s first presidency by winning the 2020 election – and was confirmed by the Senate to a five-year term in 2024.“I am glad to be able to continue my work as an independent government watchdog and whistleblower advocate,” Dellinger said in a statement. “I am grateful to the judges and justices who have concluded that I should be allowed to remain on the job while the courts decide whether my office can retain a measure of independence from direct partisan and political control.”Harris said the court should use this case to lay down a marker and check federal judges who “in the last few weeks alone have halted dozens of presidential actions (or even perceived actions)” that encroached on Trump’s presidential powers.The court already has pared back a 1935 ruling, known as Humphrey’s Executor, that protected presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed leaders of independent agencies from arbitrary firings.Conservative justices have called into question limits on the president’s ability to remove the agency heads. In 2020, for instance, the court by a 5-4 vote upheld Trump’s first-term firing of the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).Chief justice John Roberts wrote for the court that “the President’s removal power is the rule, not the exception”. But in that same opinion, Roberts drew distinctions that suggested the court could take a different view of efforts to remove the whistleblower watchdog. “In any event, the OSC exercises only limited jurisdiction to enforce certain rules governing Federal Government employers and employees. It does not bind private parties at all or wield regulatory authority comparable to the CFPB,” Roberts wrote.The new administration already has indicated it would seek to entirely overturn the Humphrey’s Executor decision, which held that Franklin D Roosevelt could not arbitrarily fire a Federal Trade Commission member during his presidency. Trump has taken aim at people who are on the multimember boards that run an alphabet soup of federal agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit System Review Board.Like Dellinger, they were confirmed to specific terms in office and the federal laws under which the agencies operate protect them from arbitrary firings. Lower courts have so far blocked some of those firings. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump administration gives schools deadline to cut DEI or lose federal funds

      by

      The Trump administration is giving the US’s schools and universities two weeks to eliminate diversity initiatives or risk losing federal money, raising the stakes in the president’s fight against “wokeness”.In a memo on Friday, the education department gave an ultimatum to stop using “racial preferences” as a factor in admissions, financial aid, hiring or other areas. Schools are being given 14 days to end any practice that treats students or workers differently because of their race.Educators at colleges nationwide were rushing to evaluate their risk and decide whether to stand up for practices they believe are legal. The sweeping demand threatens to upend all aspects of campus operations, from essays on college applications to classroom lessons and campus clubs.It’s meant to correct what the memo described as rampant discrimination in education, often against white and Asian students.“Schools have been operating on the pretext that selecting students for ‘diversity’ or similar euphemisms is not selecting them based on race,” said Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights. “No longer. Students should be assessed according to merit, accomplishment and character.”The guidance drew sharp backlash from civil rights groups and university groups. Some believe its vague language is meant to have a chilling effect, pressuring schools to eliminate anything touching on the topic of race even if it may be defensible in court.“Creating a sense of risk around doing work that might promote diverse and welcoming campuses is much more of the goal than a clear statement of existing law,” said Jonathan Fansmith, senior vice-president of government relations at the American Council on Education, an association of college presidents.The memo is an extension of Donald Trump’s executive order banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs. As legal justification, it cites the 2023 supreme court decision barring race as a factor in college admissions.“Put simply, educational institutions may neither separate or segregate students based on race, nor distribute benefits or burdens based on race,” it said.On Monday the education department announced it also cut $600m in grants for organizations that train teachers. The programs promoted “divisive” concepts such as DEI, critical race theory and social justice activism, the department said.Confusion around the implications of Trump’s anti-DEI order was apparent at last week’s confirmation hearing for education secretary nominee Linda McMahon. Asked whether classes on African American history would run afoul of Trump’s order, McMahon said she wasn’t certain.The California School Boards Association is awaiting legal guidance so it can advise schools on the Trump administration’s deadline, spokesperson Troy Flint said.“At this point there is not enough information for a step-by-step playbook that tells school districts if you were doing A then now you should do B, or perhaps eliminate the whole program entirely,” he said. “I know people want that granular level of detail. But this is a new era, with some novel civil rights theories and there is no definitive reference for what’s happening now.”The new guidance takes aim directly at college admissions, suggesting colleges have sought to work around the supreme court’s decision.College essays, for instance, cannot be used to predict a student’s race, the guidance says. In the supreme court decision, Chief Justice John Roberts said nothing prevents colleges “from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life,” though he warned that colleges couldn’t use essays as an indirect workaround to consider students’ race.The memo also said it’s unlawful for colleges to eliminate standardized testing requirements “to achieve a desired racial balance or to increase racial diversity”. Dozens of colleges across the US have dropped SAT and ACT requirements in recent years, citing concerns the exams favor students from high-income families.Practices that have long been commonplace could become legal liabilities, including recruiting in underrepresented areas or buying lists of potential students with certain academic and demographic information, said Angel B Pérez, the CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.“Colleges and universities are going to find themselves between a rock and a hard place,” Pérez said. “They know that what they’re doing is not illegal, but they are worried that if they do not comply, not having federal funding will decimate them.”Some universities said they expect little change. At Oregon State University, a legal review concluded that its programs “are fully compliant with all state and federal laws”, according to a campus message from Rob Odom, vice-president of university relations and marketing.The department memo appears to take aim at scholarships for students from certain racial backgrounds. There’s been legal debate about whether the supreme court decision extends to financial aid, with some schools and institutions deciding to scrap racial requirements for some scholarships.The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators said there’s no consensus on the question, and the group is trying to understand how the memo could affect student aid.“The last thing students need when making plans about how to pay for college is uncertainty over when or whether they will receive financial aid they’ve been relying on,” the group said in a statement.Trump has called for the elimination of the education department, and Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) has slashed dozens of contracts deemed wasteful.The Doge team won a legal victory on Monday when a federal judge declined to block it from federal student loan records. The judge said the plaintiff, the University of California Student Association, failed to prove it was harmed by Doge’s access to the data. More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump administration files first supreme court appeal over firing of government watchdog

      by

      Donald Trump’s administration has asked the supreme court to approve the firing of the head of a federal agency dedicated to protecting whistleblowers in the first appeal of Trump’s new term and a key test of his battle with the judicial branch.Hampton Dellinger, the head of the office of the special counsel (OSC), is among the fired government watchdogs who have sued the Trump administration, arguing that their dismissals were illegal and that they should be reinstated.The OSC is an independent federal agency that serves as “a secure channel for federal employees to blow the whistle by disclosing wrongdoing”.It is also intended to enforce the Hatch Act, a 1939 law designed to ensure that government programs are carried out in a nonpartisan way, and to enforce a merit system by investigating and prosecuting racial discrimination, partisan political discrimination, nepotism and coerced political activity.Dellinger has said his office’s work was “needed now more than ever”, noting the “unprecedented” number of firings, in many cases without any specified cause, of federal employees with civil service protections in recent weeks by the Trump administration.On Wednesday, the federal judge Amy Berman Jackson reinstated Dellinger to his position pending a 26 February court hearing, writing that the language of the 1978 law that created Dellinger’s position “expresses Congress’s clear intent to ensure the independence of the special counsel and insulate his work from being buffeted by the winds of political change”.According to that law, the special counsel “may be removed by the president only for inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office”.As the Trump administration implements sweeping firings throughout the federal government, Dellinger has argued that his dismissal, via a one-sentence email that did not specify the cause, was unlawful.Now, the Trump justice department has petitioned the supreme court to undo Jackson’s order, arguing that allowing a judge to reinstate an agency head for two weeks, pending a 26 February hearing on the case, is an impermissible check on presidential power.“Until now, as far as we are aware, no court in American history has wielded an injunction to force the president to retain an agency head,” Trump’s acting solicitor general, Sarah M Harris, wrote in the brief, obtained by the Associated Press on Sunday.The case is not expected to be docketed until after the supreme court returns from the Presidents’ Day holiday weekend, meaning the justices will not respond until Tuesday at the earliest.The Trump administration argues in its brief that letting the order in Dellinger’s case stand could “embolden” judges to issue additional blocks in the roughly 70 lawsuits the Trump administration is facing so far.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt notes some of the dozen or more cases where judges have slowed Trump’s agenda, including by ordering the temporary lifting of a foreign aid funding freeze and blocking workers with Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” team from accessing treasury department data for now.A supreme court ruling in favor of the Trump administration in the Dellinger case would overturn decades of precedent, legal experts have said. Conservative Trump supporters have been pushing for the supreme court to overturn the 1935 supreme court ruling protecting Congress’s power to shield the heads of independent agencies from being fired by a president.“Since my arrival at OSC last year, I could not be more proud of all we have accomplished,” Dellinger said in a statement to Politico last week. “The agency’s work has earned praise from advocates for whistleblowers, veterans, and others. The effort to remove me has no factual nor legal basis – none – which means it is illegal.”The office of the special counsel is separate from justice department special counsels, who are appointed by the attorney general for specific investigations, such as Jack Smith.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      The courts separate democracy from autocracy. Will Trump defy them?

      by

      Will the Trump administration defy the courts?JD Vance’s tweet last weekend that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power” has sparked widespread concern that the Trump administration might become the first in US history to do so. At least at this stage, it is not clear that it will come to that, notwithstanding the president’s proclivity for asserting limitless executive power. But as other countries’ experiences show, if he were to adopt the position of the US vice-president, Trump would be crossing perhaps the most fundamental line demarcating constitutional democracy from autocracy.Consider just a few examples. In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez spent years undermining the country’s supreme court, declaring that it lacked “legitimate and moral authority”. The former president later refused to comply with a 2003 order to demilitarize the Caracas police force, instead tightening military control over law enforcement to entrench his power. In Hungary, after failing to enforce rulings of the constitutional court, Viktor Orbán’s government openly defied the European Union’s highest court’s ruling finding Hungary’s restrictive asylum scheme in violation of EU law. Likewise, in Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan systematically ignored domestic and European court of human rights rulings that ordered the government to release journalists and other political activists critical of his government.Nothing is more challenging to an authoritarian than an independent judiciary ready to hold the leader accountable. When would-be authoritarians perceive judicial oversight as a threat, they respond by dismissing and defying court rulings or otherwise undermining judicial independence. By the time the authoritarian takeover is complete, the judiciary is rendered toothless. Courts are especially vulnerable to such moves because they do not have their own enforcement arms.To be sure, we are not there yet. But Vance seems to see these examples not as object lessons in what not to do, but as models for the US president to follow. In 2021, Vance said his “one piece of advice” to Trump for a second term would be to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people … And when the courts – because you will get taken to court – and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’” (It is disputed whether Jackson even said this, but in any event he never defied the court.)In Trump’s last term, he had a worse won-lost record in the supreme court than any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt – yet he abided by all court orders. And in the wake of concern about Vance’ s comments, Trump said he always obeys courts, but will pursue appeals. Thus far, that seems to be the case. But no responsible government official – much less the No 2 official in the executive branch – should even suggest that defying the courts is appropriate.View image in fullscreenTrump’s right-hand man, Elon Musk, is also fanning the flames. On 8 February, hours after a federal judge in New York temporarily blocked Musk’s team from accessing sensitive personal information held by the Department of the Treasury on millions of Americans, Musk shared a tweet from another user saying: “I don’t like the precedent it sets when you defy a judicial ruling, but I’m just wondering what other options are these judges leaving us.” The next day, Musk posted: “A corrupt judge protecting corruption. He needs to be impeached NOW!”On 12 February, Musk tweeted: “Bravo!” in response to a claim by El Salvador’s autocratic president, Nayib Bukele, that he had impeached judges in 2021 “and then proceeded to fix the country”. Musk added: “We must impeach judges who are grossly undermining the will of the people and destroying America. It is the only way.” Bukele’s removal of five constitutional court judges in 2021 is widely regarded as a “technical coup” that paved the way for him to seek re-election in violation of constitutional term limits. Musk is no lawyer, but he should know that in the US, impeachment is reserved for “high crimes and misdemeanors”, not decisions Musk does not like.Government officials are of course free to criticize court decisions. But Vance’s and Musk’s comments echo those of authoritarian regimes around the world, which often seek to undermine the legitimacy of any institution that might constrain their actions – the courts, the press, the non-profit sector. The criticism is often the first step in a campaign to sweep away all constraints.The federal courts in the US system are given independence and final say on legal disputes so that they can act as a check on the political branches. In 1975, the supreme court explained that “all orders and judgments of courts must be complied with promptly.” Indeed, the chief justice, John Roberts, in his annual end-of-year report on the federal judiciary in 2024, identified “threats to defy lawfully entered judgments” as one of the core issues that “threaten the independence of judges on which the rule of law depends”.The moment of truth may come soon. More than 60 lawsuits have been filed challenging Trump’s initial measures – from seeking to revoke birthright citizenship to freezing federal funding. Nearly every court to rule thus far has ruled against the administration.Were the Trump administration to follow Vance’s and Musk’s advice and defy the supreme court, the fallout would be swift, widespread – and justified. The supreme court has limited formal resources to compel the president to follow its dictates, because the president, not the courts, oversees federal law enforcement. Despite that formal reality, defiance would be an impeachable offense – and if the Republican party stood behind the president at that point, it would pay greatly at the polls. That’s because few principles are as fundamental to the American system as the notion that the supreme court has final say on constitutional and statutory issues and its orders must be obeyed. Trump would cross that line at his own, his party’s, and the country’s peril.

      Amrit Singh is a law professor and executive director of the Rule of Law Impact Lab at Stanford Law School. David Cole is a professor at Georgetown Law and former legal director of the ACLU More