I agree with your premise, but I've seen it suggested that the President's legal team may in fact want this to play out all the way to the Supremes.
While it's clear the administration could have batted this particular obstacle away procedurally, that would be playing the game on the adversary's turf, opening up the field for a thousand motions to bloom, each one of which would have to be fought.
What the administration wants is for the Supremes to rule once and for all in favor of the unitary executive. And since Roberts was specifically chosen by Bush 43 because he supports the theory of the unitary executive, it seems likely that he would be happy to help.
Just a thought...I've no hard evidence for any of this.
That is a good thought, David, and an interesting long term strategy. But, I think they probably could go to Scotus.
But, I tried to show that I was reluctant to make any strong criticism of the strategy simply because I’m not in a position to know everything that went into the decisions. But, my general tendency in litigation is to be as aggressive as possible, so I may have erred in that direction.
But saying that reminds me of one story from my legal practice years ago. I was hired by an accountant who was in a very nasty fight in connection with the dissolution of his accounting firm. Everyone hated everyone else, and no one could get along. Not the parties, not the lawyers.
This fellow came to me and said that I had been recommended to him because someone told him that I was the “toughest, most aggressive lawyer in Tennessee.” (Sorry, I’m just repeating what he said.)
I assessed the situation and talked to a number of people. I then sat down with my new client and told him that I was not going to be the most aggressive lawyer in the group. That what they needed was someone that everyone could talk to and thought was reasonable. So I was going to put on my white hat, be the nice guy, and see if I could get the matter resolved.
Later, after we successfully resolved the dispute, my client told me that my insistence upon not being the most aggressive lawyer in the room was just what was needed. That was not my usual niche, but it worked that time.
My point with this long story is that sometimes super aggressiveness is not what is needed. So, my instinct on this matter could well be wrong.
SCOTUS needs to issue a declaratory ruling on the tripartite structure of the government created by the Constitution, of three separate, independent, and co-equal branches, executive, legislative, and judicial, in which no branch can exert direct control over the other:
"The Constitution established the Executive Branch as an independent and co-equal branch of our tripartite government, and the two other branches, the legislative and judicial branches, have no direct power over it. The Congress may not tell the President how to run the Executive Branch or micro-manage his actions therein - but the House may refuse to pay for Executive Branch agencies or their operations or refuse to pay for the courts or their operations.
Similarly, the courts, federal or otherwise, may rule on Congressional legislation signed into law by the Executive, judge it to be unconstitutional, and refuse to issue the orders to enforce those laws - but the courts may not direct the Congress to write laws or alter legislation to their liking, nor may they order the President to sign legislation or withhold his consent. ...
And each branch runs its own affairs, and the other branches do not have the power under the Constitution to interfere in any way. Such actions would be ultra vires, beyond the scope of the powers given in the Constitution - and the Constitution is the Supreme Law of the United States - even over the Executive-created Administrative State.
The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1878 and its amendments in later years, culminating in 1978, has been purported to establish the Civil Service and the Senior Executive Service as a “fourth branch” of government - and the Congress, courts, and Executive Branch in the past has treated it as such. But this is clearly flying in the face of the Constitution and its Amendments. There is no amendment which establishes such a fourth branch, and there is no wording in the organic Constitution which mentions the Civil Service or the Senior Executive Service - none, whatsoever. Courts may have “read” purported rights of employees of that alleged fourth branch into the law, and there is precedent for the US government having treated the Civil Service created by the Executive Branch as a separate branch of the government (since about 1937, in fact) - and superior to the three branches enumerated in the Constitution.
But long-standing legal precedents, like the ones established in Dred Scott or Plessy v. Ferguson may be overturned, even though they are left in place for decades, in order to conform the policies and operations of the government to the requirements set out in the Constitution and its Amendments, which are the supreme law of the United States.
President John F. Kennedy established the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in 1962, at the stroke of his pen, by Executive Order. President Truman created the Central Intelligence Agency, in like manner, in 1947. President Trump, in his sole and absolute discretion, may countermand those Executive Orders and disestablish those agencies entirely, or distribute their functions to other Executive Branch agencies, at the stroke of a pen, by Executive Order as well - and neither the courts nor the Congress may interfere." https://streamfortyseven.substack.com/p/reining-in-the-administrative-state
Democrats claim we’re in a constitutional crisis because President Trump believes — and acts on the belief — that the executive should control the executive branch. It is a crisis their party has forced on Americans for the last 125 years.
It was the Democrat Party of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson who designed an administrative state to be unaccountable to voters and to ultimately swallow the original Constitution. Constitutional scholars have described this situation as the United States functioning under “two constitutions” — the original, and a competing system of government under Progressives’ “living constitution.” We’re about to see which one will win this very long march through American law and culture.
You constantly wrote "low-level judge." Does not this logic apply to the Supreme Court as well? Should the Supreme Court rule that the President cannot exercise his lawful authority over his subordinates, would not the President be within his constitutional rights to denounce and ignore the ruling?
My non-lawyerly reading of one of the Rumsfeld cases (I forget which) is that the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo trials could not proceed unless proper civil custody and chain of evidence were followed on the battlefield. Would this not be an arrogation to itself by the Court of Commander-in-Chief responsibilities? That the Court has the power to put legal ideals ahead of military missions and the lives of service people?
Well, I emphasized that he is a low-level judge, because in my experience, most federal judges think that they are God’s cousin. But, of all the article 3 judges, the district judges occupy the lowest tier.
I think that your comparison to a Supreme Court is a good analogy, but I was focusing on the district judges because there are so many of them that the potential for abuse is much greater.
I have not read the cases involving theGuantánamo prisoners, so I cannot comment on that.
It's ultra vires on the part of the federal judiciary (overwhelmingly Democrat appointees). The Democrats seek to control the US through the Administrative State set up by FDR in 1937:
""If the opinion of the Supreme Court covered the whole ground of this act, it ought not to control the coordinate authorities of this Government. The Congress, the Executive, and the Court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution. Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others. It is as much the duty of the House of Representatives, of the Senate, and of the President to decide upon the constitutionality of any bill or resolution which may be presented to them for passage or approval as it is of the supreme judges when it may be brought before them for judicial decision. The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both. The authority of the Supreme Court must not, therefore, be permitted to control the Congress or the Executive when acting in their legislative capacities, but to have only such influence as the force of their reasoning may deserve." https://streamfortyseven.substack.com/p/does-congress-have-the-power-under
And that act of defiance should be quite effective in bringing this Constitutional crisis to a head, because what we have is an effective "fourth branch" of government asserting power over the elected and Constitutional three branches of government:
"The post-New Deal administrative state is unconstitutional, and its validation by the legal system amounts to nothing less than a bloodless constitutional revolution. The original New Dealers were aware, at least to some degree, that their vision of the national government's proper role and structure could not be squared with the written Constitution: The Administrative Process, James Landis's classic exposition of the New Deal model of administration, fairly drips with contempt for the idea of a limited national government subject to a formal, tripartite separation of powers. Faced with a choice between the administrative state and the Constitution, the architects of our modern government chose the administrative state, and their choice has stuck. ... The United States Congress today effectively exercises general legislative powers, in contravention of the constitutional principle of limited powers. Moreover, Congress frequently delegates that general legislative authority to administrative agencies, in contravention of Article I. Furthermore, those agencies are not always subject to the direct control of the President, in contravention of Article II. In addition, those agencies sometimes exercise the judicial power, in contravention of Article III. Finally, those agencies typically concentrate legislative, executive, and judicial functions in the same institution, in simultaneous contravention of Articles I, II, and III. In short, the modern administrative state openly flouts almost every important structural precept of the American constitutional order." The Rise and Rise of the Administrative State, Gary S. Lawson, Boston University School of Law, at https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1941&context=faculty_scholarship.
The unconstitutional Administrative State, put very largely in place by Franklin Roosevelt and largely staffed by Democrats, which has cemented Democrats in power and continied their policies, regardless of elections and the will of the electorate, must be ended and utterly abolished, and Constitutional rule re-established:
A contemporaneous writing, from 1938, was prescient of the current situation:
“The test came in the first one hundred days. No matter how carefully a revolution may have been planned there is bound to be a crucial time. That comes when the actual seizure of power is taking place. In this case certain steps were necessary. They were difficult and daring steps. But more than that, they had to be taken in a certain sequence, with forethought and precision of timing. One out of place might have been fatal. What happened was that one followed another in exactly the right order, not one out of time or out of place.
Having passed this crisis, the New Deal went on from one problem to another, taking them in the proper order, according to revolutionary technic; and if the handling of one was inconsistent with the handling of another, even to the point of nullity, that was blunder in reverse. The effect was to keep people excited about one thing at a time, and divided, while steadily through all the uproar of outrage and confusion a certain end, held constantly in view, was pursued by main intention. The end held constantly in view was power.
In a revolutionary situation mistakes and failures are not what they seem. They are scaffolding. Error is not repealed. It is compounded by a longer law, by more decrees and regulations, by further extensions of the administrative hand. As deLawd said in The Green Pastures, that when you have passed a miracle you have to pass another one to take care of it, so it was with the New Deal. Every miracle it passed, whether it went right or wrong, had one result. Executive power over the social and economic life of the nation was increased. Draw a curve to represent the rise of executive power and look there for the mistakes. You will not find them. The curve is consistent. At the end of the first year, in his annual message to the Congress, January 4, 1934, President Roosevelt said: "It is to the eternal credit of the American people that this tremendous readjustment of our national life is being accomplished peacefully."
Peacefully if possible—of course.
But the revolutionary historian will go much further. Writing at some distance in time he will be much less impressed by the fact that it was peacefully accomplished than by the marvelous technic of bringing it to pass not only within the form but within the word, so that people were all the while fixed in the delusion that they were talking about the same things because they were using the same words. Opposite and violently hostile ideas were represented by the same word signifiers. This was the American people's first experience with dialectic according to Marx and Lenin.
Until it was too late, few understood one like Julius C. Smith, of the American Bar Association, saying: "Is there any labor leader, any businessman, any lawyer or any other citizen of America so blind that he cannot see that this country is drifting at an accelerated pace into administrative absolutism similar to that which prevailed in the governments of antiquity, the governments of the Middle Ages, and in the great totalitarian governments of today? Make no mistake about it. Even as Mussolini and Hitler rose to absolute power under the forms of law . . . so may administrative absolutism be fastened upon this country within [and yet fundamentally opposed to] the Constitution and within the forms of law." https://cdn.mises.org/Peoples%20Pottage_2.pdf"
And we've been in a Constitutional crisis since the New Deal, the creation of the unconstitutional Administrative State - in effect, nearly the entirety of the Code of Federal Regulations is unconstitutional - the regulations therein are treated as binding law with the same basis as the statutory laws in the United States Code - and the lot of them are unconstitutional and should be regarded as a nullity and of no effect.
Lincoln did not limit himself to known confederates, he imprisoned 50,000 people without cause or limit. FDR imprisoned 120 Japanese Americans and caused them to lose all their property. Someone might explain to me why the Japanese Americans on Hawaii were not detained since they were far closer to an area threatened by invasion than California or Oregon. Yes there are laws that should be broken but there is the other side of the coin or perhaps the same side of the coin when judges abandon the law and refuse to see it.
Nineteen rebellious states are attempting to override the Constitution and hamstring the country's chief executive.
The opening sentence of Article II of the U.S. Constitution is straightforward and grants one person, the president, broad powers: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
Must Trump Cooperate with an Attempted Coup Camouflaged as a Court Order? The short answer is no.
Of course not if the nation is under a mortal threat. Trump can do what Lincoln did and suspend writ of habeas corpus to hold internal enemies and conspirators without charge or trial until the danger is over.
Wow. Since Trump was inaugurated, the Democrats have discovered both inflation and states rights.
I am sure that you meant that they “re-discovered“ states rights, since the Democrats originally discovered them around 1860 or so. 😆
I agree with your premise, but I've seen it suggested that the President's legal team may in fact want this to play out all the way to the Supremes.
While it's clear the administration could have batted this particular obstacle away procedurally, that would be playing the game on the adversary's turf, opening up the field for a thousand motions to bloom, each one of which would have to be fought.
What the administration wants is for the Supremes to rule once and for all in favor of the unitary executive. And since Roberts was specifically chosen by Bush 43 because he supports the theory of the unitary executive, it seems likely that he would be happy to help.
Just a thought...I've no hard evidence for any of this.
That is a good thought, David, and an interesting long term strategy. But, I think they probably could go to Scotus.
But, I tried to show that I was reluctant to make any strong criticism of the strategy simply because I’m not in a position to know everything that went into the decisions. But, my general tendency in litigation is to be as aggressive as possible, so I may have erred in that direction.
But saying that reminds me of one story from my legal practice years ago. I was hired by an accountant who was in a very nasty fight in connection with the dissolution of his accounting firm. Everyone hated everyone else, and no one could get along. Not the parties, not the lawyers.
This fellow came to me and said that I had been recommended to him because someone told him that I was the “toughest, most aggressive lawyer in Tennessee.” (Sorry, I’m just repeating what he said.)
I assessed the situation and talked to a number of people. I then sat down with my new client and told him that I was not going to be the most aggressive lawyer in the group. That what they needed was someone that everyone could talk to and thought was reasonable. So I was going to put on my white hat, be the nice guy, and see if I could get the matter resolved.
Later, after we successfully resolved the dispute, my client told me that my insistence upon not being the most aggressive lawyer in the room was just what was needed. That was not my usual niche, but it worked that time.
My point with this long story is that sometimes super aggressiveness is not what is needed. So, my instinct on this matter could well be wrong.
SCOTUS needs to issue a declaratory ruling on the tripartite structure of the government created by the Constitution, of three separate, independent, and co-equal branches, executive, legislative, and judicial, in which no branch can exert direct control over the other:
"The Constitution established the Executive Branch as an independent and co-equal branch of our tripartite government, and the two other branches, the legislative and judicial branches, have no direct power over it. The Congress may not tell the President how to run the Executive Branch or micro-manage his actions therein - but the House may refuse to pay for Executive Branch agencies or their operations or refuse to pay for the courts or their operations.
Similarly, the courts, federal or otherwise, may rule on Congressional legislation signed into law by the Executive, judge it to be unconstitutional, and refuse to issue the orders to enforce those laws - but the courts may not direct the Congress to write laws or alter legislation to their liking, nor may they order the President to sign legislation or withhold his consent. ...
And each branch runs its own affairs, and the other branches do not have the power under the Constitution to interfere in any way. Such actions would be ultra vires, beyond the scope of the powers given in the Constitution - and the Constitution is the Supreme Law of the United States - even over the Executive-created Administrative State.
The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1878 and its amendments in later years, culminating in 1978, has been purported to establish the Civil Service and the Senior Executive Service as a “fourth branch” of government - and the Congress, courts, and Executive Branch in the past has treated it as such. But this is clearly flying in the face of the Constitution and its Amendments. There is no amendment which establishes such a fourth branch, and there is no wording in the organic Constitution which mentions the Civil Service or the Senior Executive Service - none, whatsoever. Courts may have “read” purported rights of employees of that alleged fourth branch into the law, and there is precedent for the US government having treated the Civil Service created by the Executive Branch as a separate branch of the government (since about 1937, in fact) - and superior to the three branches enumerated in the Constitution.
But long-standing legal precedents, like the ones established in Dred Scott or Plessy v. Ferguson may be overturned, even though they are left in place for decades, in order to conform the policies and operations of the government to the requirements set out in the Constitution and its Amendments, which are the supreme law of the United States.
President John F. Kennedy established the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in 1962, at the stroke of his pen, by Executive Order. President Truman created the Central Intelligence Agency, in like manner, in 1947. President Trump, in his sole and absolute discretion, may countermand those Executive Orders and disestablish those agencies entirely, or distribute their functions to other Executive Branch agencies, at the stroke of a pen, by Executive Order as well - and neither the courts nor the Congress may interfere." https://streamfortyseven.substack.com/p/reining-in-the-administrative-state
This is a great read.
Also, note that the IRS and Social Security Administration openly practice nonacquiescence to judicial rulings they do not like.
In essence, the agencies will adhere to a court's ruling on one case only. They will not consider the verdict a nationwide precedent.
Another great post, John. I wish you had a wider readership than just your substack.
Keep 'em coming.
Thanks. The Federalist has picked up my last two, as well as Instapundit. Mike Huckabee wrote about and linked one.
No!!!!
Yes, We’re In A Constitutional Crisis — And It’s Democrats’ Fault
https://thefederalist.com/2025/02/12/yes-were-in-a-constitutional-crisis-and-its-democrats-fault/
Democrats claim we’re in a constitutional crisis because President Trump believes — and acts on the belief — that the executive should control the executive branch. It is a crisis their party has forced on Americans for the last 125 years.
It was the Democrat Party of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson who designed an administrative state to be unaccountable to voters and to ultimately swallow the original Constitution. Constitutional scholars have described this situation as the United States functioning under “two constitutions” — the original, and a competing system of government under Progressives’ “living constitution.” We’re about to see which one will win this very long march through American law and culture.
I said from the beginning the president should ignore the court's order and have Treasury stop paying the judge, his staff, and remove his Marshals.
You constantly wrote "low-level judge." Does not this logic apply to the Supreme Court as well? Should the Supreme Court rule that the President cannot exercise his lawful authority over his subordinates, would not the President be within his constitutional rights to denounce and ignore the ruling?
My non-lawyerly reading of one of the Rumsfeld cases (I forget which) is that the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo trials could not proceed unless proper civil custody and chain of evidence were followed on the battlefield. Would this not be an arrogation to itself by the Court of Commander-in-Chief responsibilities? That the Court has the power to put legal ideals ahead of military missions and the lives of service people?
Well, I emphasized that he is a low-level judge, because in my experience, most federal judges think that they are God’s cousin. But, of all the article 3 judges, the district judges occupy the lowest tier.
I think that your comparison to a Supreme Court is a good analogy, but I was focusing on the district judges because there are so many of them that the potential for abuse is much greater.
I have not read the cases involving theGuantánamo prisoners, so I cannot comment on that.
FYI you seem to be agreeing with the posts of another substacker - https://streamfortyseven.substack.com/p/neither-president-trump-nor-his-appointed
It's ultra vires on the part of the federal judiciary (overwhelmingly Democrat appointees). The Democrats seek to control the US through the Administrative State set up by FDR in 1937:
""If the opinion of the Supreme Court covered the whole ground of this act, it ought not to control the coordinate authorities of this Government. The Congress, the Executive, and the Court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution. Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others. It is as much the duty of the House of Representatives, of the Senate, and of the President to decide upon the constitutionality of any bill or resolution which may be presented to them for passage or approval as it is of the supreme judges when it may be brought before them for judicial decision. The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both. The authority of the Supreme Court must not, therefore, be permitted to control the Congress or the Executive when acting in their legislative capacities, but to have only such influence as the force of their reasoning may deserve." https://streamfortyseven.substack.com/p/does-congress-have-the-power-under
And that act of defiance should be quite effective in bringing this Constitutional crisis to a head, because what we have is an effective "fourth branch" of government asserting power over the elected and Constitutional three branches of government:
"The post-New Deal administrative state is unconstitutional, and its validation by the legal system amounts to nothing less than a bloodless constitutional revolution. The original New Dealers were aware, at least to some degree, that their vision of the national government's proper role and structure could not be squared with the written Constitution: The Administrative Process, James Landis's classic exposition of the New Deal model of administration, fairly drips with contempt for the idea of a limited national government subject to a formal, tripartite separation of powers. Faced with a choice between the administrative state and the Constitution, the architects of our modern government chose the administrative state, and their choice has stuck. ... The United States Congress today effectively exercises general legislative powers, in contravention of the constitutional principle of limited powers. Moreover, Congress frequently delegates that general legislative authority to administrative agencies, in contravention of Article I. Furthermore, those agencies are not always subject to the direct control of the President, in contravention of Article II. In addition, those agencies sometimes exercise the judicial power, in contravention of Article III. Finally, those agencies typically concentrate legislative, executive, and judicial functions in the same institution, in simultaneous contravention of Articles I, II, and III. In short, the modern administrative state openly flouts almost every important structural precept of the American constitutional order." The Rise and Rise of the Administrative State, Gary S. Lawson, Boston University School of Law, at https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1941&context=faculty_scholarship.
The unconstitutional Administrative State, put very largely in place by Franklin Roosevelt and largely staffed by Democrats, which has cemented Democrats in power and continied their policies, regardless of elections and the will of the electorate, must be ended and utterly abolished, and Constitutional rule re-established:
A contemporaneous writing, from 1938, was prescient of the current situation:
“The test came in the first one hundred days. No matter how carefully a revolution may have been planned there is bound to be a crucial time. That comes when the actual seizure of power is taking place. In this case certain steps were necessary. They were difficult and daring steps. But more than that, they had to be taken in a certain sequence, with forethought and precision of timing. One out of place might have been fatal. What happened was that one followed another in exactly the right order, not one out of time or out of place.
Having passed this crisis, the New Deal went on from one problem to another, taking them in the proper order, according to revolutionary technic; and if the handling of one was inconsistent with the handling of another, even to the point of nullity, that was blunder in reverse. The effect was to keep people excited about one thing at a time, and divided, while steadily through all the uproar of outrage and confusion a certain end, held constantly in view, was pursued by main intention. The end held constantly in view was power.
In a revolutionary situation mistakes and failures are not what they seem. They are scaffolding. Error is not repealed. It is compounded by a longer law, by more decrees and regulations, by further extensions of the administrative hand. As deLawd said in The Green Pastures, that when you have passed a miracle you have to pass another one to take care of it, so it was with the New Deal. Every miracle it passed, whether it went right or wrong, had one result. Executive power over the social and economic life of the nation was increased. Draw a curve to represent the rise of executive power and look there for the mistakes. You will not find them. The curve is consistent. At the end of the first year, in his annual message to the Congress, January 4, 1934, President Roosevelt said: "It is to the eternal credit of the American people that this tremendous readjustment of our national life is being accomplished peacefully."
Peacefully if possible—of course.
But the revolutionary historian will go much further. Writing at some distance in time he will be much less impressed by the fact that it was peacefully accomplished than by the marvelous technic of bringing it to pass not only within the form but within the word, so that people were all the while fixed in the delusion that they were talking about the same things because they were using the same words. Opposite and violently hostile ideas were represented by the same word signifiers. This was the American people's first experience with dialectic according to Marx and Lenin.
Until it was too late, few understood one like Julius C. Smith, of the American Bar Association, saying: "Is there any labor leader, any businessman, any lawyer or any other citizen of America so blind that he cannot see that this country is drifting at an accelerated pace into administrative absolutism similar to that which prevailed in the governments of antiquity, the governments of the Middle Ages, and in the great totalitarian governments of today? Make no mistake about it. Even as Mussolini and Hitler rose to absolute power under the forms of law . . . so may administrative absolutism be fastened upon this country within [and yet fundamentally opposed to] the Constitution and within the forms of law." https://cdn.mises.org/Peoples%20Pottage_2.pdf"
https://streamfortyseven.substack.com/p/reining-in-the-administrative-state
I've posted two similar posts, one of which Francis Turner refers to, below:
https://streamfortyseven.substack.com/p/who-shall-rule-appointed-unelected
https://streamfortyseven.substack.com/p/does-congress-have-the-power-under
And we've been in a Constitutional crisis since the New Deal, the creation of the unconstitutional Administrative State - in effect, nearly the entirety of the Code of Federal Regulations is unconstitutional - the regulations therein are treated as binding law with the same basis as the statutory laws in the United States Code - and the lot of them are unconstitutional and should be regarded as a nullity and of no effect.
Lincoln did not limit himself to known confederates, he imprisoned 50,000 people without cause or limit. FDR imprisoned 120 Japanese Americans and caused them to lose all their property. Someone might explain to me why the Japanese Americans on Hawaii were not detained since they were far closer to an area threatened by invasion than California or Oregon. Yes there are laws that should be broken but there is the other side of the coin or perhaps the same side of the coin when judges abandon the law and refuse to see it.
Then those 19 are breaking the law. What happens to those that break the law? Simple!!
LINKS TO THE FIRST TO ARTICLES.
Trump Need Not Bend To 19 AGs Trying To Thwart His Treasury (LINKS)
https://thefederalist.com/2025/02/14/trump-need-not-bend-to-the-19-state-lawfare-coup-trying-to-thwart-his-treasury/
Nineteen rebellious states are attempting to override the Constitution and hamstring the country's chief executive.
The opening sentence of Article II of the U.S. Constitution is straightforward and grants one person, the president, broad powers: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
Must Trump Cooperate with an Attempted Coup Camouflaged as a Court Order? The short answer is no.
President Trump should ignore them and go on about what he’s doing to help the country. I have no interest in helping the country only themselves.
Only if he loses.
Of course not if the nation is under a mortal threat. Trump can do what Lincoln did and suspend writ of habeas corpus to hold internal enemies and conspirators without charge or trial until the danger is over.