Trump 2.0 - Challenging the courts

 

I'd say Trump is just letting Roberts know who's boss.  Challenging him.

Its behavior in the Alien Enemies Act case seems designed to rankle the chief in every conceivable way: Rather than win the case on the merits, the administration has launched a multilevel assault on the presiding judge, James Boasberg. It isn’t just that Donald Trump, along with his co-President Elon Musk, has called for Boasberg’s impeachment—though that escalation did prompt Roberts to issue a rare rejoinder. It’s that the Justice Department, too, has gotten in on the action, insulting Boasberg in insolent filings that openly question his integrity, neutrality, and competence. In short, the administration is deliberately staking this out as a battle between the executive branch and the judicial branch.

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[T]he Trump administration seems eager to prevail in the court of public opinion, then leverage that victory to make the courts fall in line—the same play it’s running on Congress. The public-facing side of this strategy is obvious enough. First, the administration raced to deport Venezuelan migrants whom it accused, without evidence, of membership in the Tren de Aragua gang. Then it invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to argue that courts had no authority to stop the operation. When Boasberg ordered a halt to it nonetheless, high-ranking Trump officials bashed him in the media, while Trump and Musk called for his impeachment. House Republicans have now introduced articles of impeachment against the judge, and Musk is encouraging the effort by donating money to lawmakers who support it.

In court, the administration’s tone is only somewhat less contemptuous.

“The court,” the lawyers wrote, “has now spent more time trying to ferret out information about the government’s flight schedules and relations with foreign countries than it did in investigating the facts” before ruling for the migrants. (In reality, this information is largely public already, because the White House shared many details of the operation while boasting about the deportation flights.) Boasberg, they continued, was seeking “to beat a dead horse solely for the sake of prying from the government legally immaterial facts,” including “state secrets.” (The relevant facts are not “legally immaterial”—they could show whether the government broke the law!) The filing called on Boasberg to end his “unnecessary judicial fishing expeditions” and asked him to freeze proceedings while they begged an appeals court to bail them out.

  Slate

If they behave this way to a judge who has ruled favorably for Trump, imagine what they'll do to judges like Tanya Chutkan.

The DOJ’s crude treatment of Boasberg sends the unmistakable message that he is a rogue judge who needs to be reined in by a tough president and, ideally, a congressional impeachment. Attorney General Pam Bondi made her agency’s position clear on Wednesday, when she accused the judge of “meddling in our government.” Why, she asked, is Boasberg “trying to protect terrorists who invaded our country over American citizens?” (Again, there is no evidence these people are terrorists.) The thrust of her comments, echoed in DOJ filings, is that Boasberg is so biased and reckless that he cannot be trusted to oversee a case with such sensitive implications for national security.

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The chief justice himself appointed Boasberg to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as presiding judge; in that position, he regularly reviewed, and ruled upon, extraordinarily sensitive requests by intelligence agencies to surveil communications between suspected spies and foreign powers. The surveillance court’s work is shrouded in secrecy, and even the smallest public disclosure could jeopardize vital intelligence operations.

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And the fact that [Roberts] stepped into the fray to defend Boasberg is proof in itself that the administration has made a misstep. Moreover, a defining feature of Roberts’ jurisprudence is his intolerance for bad lawyering. His past votes against Trump reflect an aversion to sloppy and dishonest legal arguments, and he does not take kindly to insulting, patronizing, or underhanded reasoning. Yet that is exactly how the Justice Department has approached Boasberg in this case.