A deep constitutional crisis in the USA is just weeks away. Trump visited the Department of Justice (DoJ) yesterday and apparently told staff there that his victory last year had “given us a mandate” for “a far reaching investigation ... into the corruption of our system” by Democrats and vowed to “expel the rogue actors and corrupt forces from our government” and “expose their egregious crimes and severe misconduct.” Considering he’s a convicted felon, fraudster, adjudicated rapist who would have been charged with insurrection and treason had he lost in November it’s all a bit rich and should strike fear into his political opponents. Trump talks about corrupt forces while sitting atop a self-constructed mountain of it.
The prospect of a sitting American President going after his adversaries using the justice department as a weapon is truly shocking, the sort of thing despots like Putin and Lukashenko are well known for doing. But that isn’t the only reason for the coming crisis. A showdown is expected imminently between Trump and the courts because they are ruling against many of his Executive Orders.
A judge in California has ordered the administration to reinstate thousands of federal employees fired recently on the grounds that they were ‘probationary’ and had under performed in some unspecified way.
District Judge William Alsup described the mass firings as a “sham” strategy by the government’s central human resources office, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), to sidestep legal requirements for reducing the federal workforce.
Alsup gave DoJ's counsel a real dressing down after Charles Ezell, the acting director of the OPM refused to testify in the case: “You will not bring the people in here to be cross-examined. You’re afraid to do so because you know cross examination would reveal the truth. I tend to doubt that you’re telling me the truth. … I’m tired of seeing you stonewall on trying to get at the truth.”
“It is sad, a sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” the judge said.
A second judge in Maryland also found the actions of the OPM breached the law. District Judge James Bredar issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) against dozens of federal agencies, departments and their leaderships that had terminated workers as part of reduction-in-workforce efforts. Bredar wrote:
“In this case, the government conducted massive layoffs, but it gave no advance notice. It claims it wasn’t required to because, it says, it dismissed each one of these thousands of probationary employees for 'performance' or other individualized reasons."
Normally, governments in liberal western democracies, would take these separate and independent rulings as a rap over the knuckles and seek a way to achieve their goals by lawful means, amend the law through legislation, or abandon the plans altogether. But not Trump.
Listen to his press spokesman Karoline Leavitt speaking to reporters about these TROs outside the White House:
She appears to be indicating that these judges (and others) have no legal grounds for overruling Trump, that even trying to do so is "unconstitutional." Leavitt suggested there are "judicial activists" who are trying to block Trump's "executive authority." She also talked about fighting back and appealing but she gave no clear commitment to abide by the rulings in the meantime.
To be clear, Trump could do the 'Reduction-in-Workforce' stuff perfectly legally using the slower but surer legislative process and Congress where he has a majority in both houses. But for reasons difficult to follow he’s chosen to employ Elon Musk and a swathe of Executive Orders to bypass law makers, which courts across America have ruled are unlawful and unconstitutional.
Leavitt claimed Biden's government faced 14 injunctions in three years while Trump had seen 15 in just one month, a statistic that appalled her, but for entirely the wrong reasons. I assume she was referring to cases where injunctions had been issued rather than TROs or cases which have not yet had a ruling at all. If you look at the litigation tracker, you can see there are now 124 cases in progress, in just 53 days of Trump's second term, more than two every 24 hours.
Someone pointed out that Adolph Hitler effectively ended democracy in Germany in his first 53 days. Trump is already well on the way.
Elsewhere, in a sign of further repression, a Palestinian student at New York's Columbia university, Mahmoud Khalil, has been detained without charge apparently for being involved in a protest about what's happening in Gaza. Khalil is a former employee of the UK government who was officially vetted before working at the British embassy in Beirut.
US authorities at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) accused him of leading “activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organisation”.
After being arrested at home he is now threatened with deportation. His arrest sparked a lot of protests at the university.
Columbia's School of Journalism has now released a statement which says the DHS "seized and detained Mahmoud Khalil, without charging him with any crime" and now many of their international students have felt afraid to come to classes and to events on campus.
"They are right to be worried. Some of our faculty members and students who have covered the protests over the Gaza war have been the object of smear campaigns and targeted on the same sites that were used to bring Khalil to the attention of Homeland Security. President Trump has warned that the effort to deport Khalil is just the first of many."
It ends:
"The Columbia Journalism School stands in defense of First Amendment principles of free speech and free press across the political spectrum. The actions we’ve outlined above jeopardize these principles and therefore the viability of our democracy. All who believe in these freedoms should steadfastly oppose the intimidation, harassment, and detention of individuals on the basis of their speech or their journalism."
The First Amendment provides that: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
We are talking here of fundamental freedoms guaranteed under the US Constitution.
Once the courts and the press are cowed into silence, people only have the option of taking to the streets and we all know where that leads. These are dangerous times.
