The mounting number of losses that Donald Trump has suffered in the courts since he returned to the White House with a blizzard of legally suspect executive orders is reminiscent of his efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat.
Back then, he took the approach of just ignoring what dozens of court cases determined: namely, that there was no evidence of fraud significant enough to have cost him the election. He continues to this day peddling the lie that Joe Biden stole the election.
Now, the president and his team are saying that activist judges are trying to usurp the authority of the executive branch by blocking a majority of Trump’s directives.
That conspiracy theory, though, doesn’t hold water once you consider that several of the judges who have issued temporary restraining orders and permanent injunctions against the Trump directives on immigration, funding cuts and a host of other issues are Republican appointees, including a couple who were nominated by Trump during his first term.
One veteran Republican appointee, U.S. District Judge Royce Lambeth, offered last week a valuable tutorial on some bedrock principles of American democracy — the three co-equal branches of government, separation of powers, checks and balances — in ordering the Trump administration to restore $12 million that Congress appropriated for Radio Free Europe.
Lambeth, who was nominated by Ronald Reagan and has sat on the bench for nearly 40 years, says the Constitution is clear about which branch of government can do what. Congress, the legislative branch, appropriates the money, and the president, the executive branch, signs the laws that codify those appropriations. Once enacted, the executive branch has no authority to revoke the appropriation. It can ask Congress to pull back the funds, but that’s as far as the executive branch can go. To do what Trump is trying to do, cut funding without Congress’ approval, is usurping legislative power and thus violates the separation-of-powers provision embedded in the U.S. Constitution.
Reasonable minds can disagree, as Lambeth acknowledges, about legal interpretations of the Constitution. The Constitution has a remedy for that as well. It’s called the appellate court system. If the Trump administration believes that Lambeth is wrong in his ruling in the Radio Free Europe case, then the Trump administration can try to get an appellate court to overturn the judge, taking an appeal all the way to the Supreme Court if it chooses. But the administration does not have the constitutional right to ignore a federal judge’s ruling unless a higher court says it can.
This understanding — that all three branches of government are equal in authority, that each has powers to hold the other in check — differentiates a democratic nation from an authoritarian one.
For the system to function as designed, it requires each branch to respect the other’s constitutional authority, even if it disagrees with the outcome of those powers when they are exercised.
Should the Trump administration adopt the attitude that it can ignore lower court decisions with which it disagrees, it could have a destabilizing effect throughout the federal government. If the rulings of federal judges can be ignored, so can the executive orders of a president or the laws passed by Congress. Anarchy and chaos would be the result.
Federal judges, regardless of the party of the president who nominated them, know that. Let’s hope most Americans do, too.
The reason that the majority of court decisions have gone against Trump’s executive orders so far — 64 times as of late last week by The Associated Press’ count — is not because of some orchestrated judicial coup. It’s because the orders have been so obviously unconstitutional.
