Commentary: The 'greatest threat' to rule of law in decades. That's how lawyers, judges see Trump
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Sometimes it seems as though the only thing that stands between a functioning democracy and a full-on Trump autocracy is a thin, black-robed line.Although the Supreme Court, in general, and conservative appellate courts, in particular, have bowed and granted President Trump permission to do pretty much anything he wants, they haven’t thoroughly capitulated to his endless grasping for ever more power.(The way invertebrate congressional Republicans have.)At the lower-court level, judges have repeatedly ruled in ways intended to check Trump, most notably when it comes to violating civil and constitutional rights in pursuit of his indiscriminate immigration dragnet.The tendency to slow-walk his administration’s response to those rulings — and ignore others that Trump thinks he can safely snub — only contribute to the perception of presidential lawlessness and a sense that our judicial system is being strained to something approaching a breaking point.Go ahead, if you’d like, and dismiss those concerns as just so much overwrought hand-wringing, or the mindless anti-Trump blathering of your friendly political columnist.
A new survey of legal experts — including federal judges, top-tier lawyers and scores of professors from some of the country’s leading law schools — finds widespread concern about the brittle state of our legal system.And it’s not just the fears of a lot of shaggy-thinking liberals.Tina Peters deserved to go to jail but not for nine years, a panel of judges decreed, ordering her resentencing.Jared Polis then stepped in and substituted his own judgment.
It was the height of arrogance.“The nation is strong as is its commitment to the rule of law,” said one appellate judge, a Republican appointee.“The current president presents the greatest threat in decades.”The survey was conducted by Bright Line Watch, a nonpartisan academic group that monit...