Washington Merry-Go-Round

IMMEDIATE RELEASE 23 March 2025
WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND
Today’s Events in Historical Perspective
America’s Longest-Running Column Founded 1932
Enough is enough
By Douglas Cohn and Eleanor Clift         
 
WASHINGTON – Are we in a constitutional crisis? The answer turns entirely on how far President Trump wants to take his assertion that the executive branch reigns supreme, especially regarding national security. If he pushes it to the extreme and defies a judge’s order, we will face the uncomfortable truth that the Judiciary lacks the power to enforce its rulings.
In the 250 years of our country’s history, every president but Andrew Jackson bowed to the supremacy of judicial review. Faced with a Supreme Court ruling that said he could not continue the forced removal of Cherokees from Georgia, he a quote attributed to him – “John Marshall has made his decision, now let’s see him enforce it” – was apocryphal, but did describe what he actually did do. He ignored the ruling.
The expulsion continued with the infamous “Trail of Tears,” and in the nearly one hundred years since, presidents have followed the law, including Richard Nixon when he was ordered to turn over incriminating tape recordings that implicated him in the Watergate coverup that drove him from office.
As Trump squares off against the judiciary, the question looms: Will anything make Trump back down?
He is so mired in egocentricity that everything he does has to be the best, the biggest, the most lavish, that it is hard to see how he might relent from a confrontation with the highest court in the land because that is where this is headed.
He did back down from imposing 25 percent tariffs on Canadian goods after the stock market went crazy by claiming he got major concessions, which was not true. Canada offered nothing but reciprocity.
He is now in a tit-for-tat back and forth with U.S. District Court Judge James E. Boasberg, who called time out on planeloads of Venezuelan migrants that the administration is shipping to El Salvador where they are being held in a notoriously tough prison that holds up to 40,000 people. The administration had the operation filmed to portray the men in shackles being frog-marched to the super prison sans their day in court.
The expulsion without due process is being challenged in court by the ACLU, and Judge Boasberg has demanded information from the administration about what grounds they have to declare these men enemy combatants under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.
The administration has responded with what is surely feigned surprise that a mere judge would dare question a commander in chief when it comes to assuring the safety of the American people. Trump’s intemperate remarks on social media about the Judge, calling him a radical leftist and saying he should be impeached, drew a wrist slap from Chief Justice John Roberts.
“Impeachment is not an appropriate response” when there is disagreement, Roberts said in a statement. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”
Trump seems hell bent on airing his disagreement at the Supreme Court, and the last thing Roberts wants to do is issue a ruling that he cannot enforce.
We are on the verge of the most significant constitutional crisis this country has ever faced short of the Civil War. If Trump gets away with flouting the rule of law despite judicial admonition, then he and a department head like Elon Musk can ignore any order they want.
To avoid this clash, Roberts will go as far as he can to find what Trump does constitutional. And if there is a line that he and at least one other conservative judge cannot cross, he will do what he has done in the past, kick the decision to Congress, saying there is no remedy for what’s happening short of new legislation – or impeachment. And that will not happen in the Republican-controlled Congress unless mainstream moderate Republicans finally band together with moderate Democrats to say enough is enough.
 
See Eleanor Clift’s book Selecting a President, and Douglas Cohn’s latest books The President’s First Year: The Only School for Presidents Is the Presidency and World War 4: Nine Scenarios (endorsed by seven flag officers).
              Twitter:  @douglas_cohn
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END WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND