Summary
Judges across the U.S. are blocking Trump’s aggressive executive orders, with some rulings expressing deep frustration.
A Trump-appointed judge halted his attempt to place 2,200 USAID employees on leave, while another blocked Elon Musk’s team from accessing Treasury records.
A Reagan-appointed judge condemned Trump’s disregard for the rule of law in a ruling against his birthright citizenship plan.
These legal setbacks are forcing federal agencies to reveal more details and raising concerns over Trump’s expansive use of executive power.
Who will enforce the judges’ rulings, is my question.
Or said another way: what prevents Trump and his goons and sycophants from simply disregarding them and carrying on whatever the hell they’re doing unabashed?
The actually physical people that are supposed to be affected play a big role. Short of locking people our of a space and systems, if an EO declared an agency “closed” but a judge said “nope, do it legal-like,” people still showing up to work and expecting to get paid are all following the law.
They hoped to be able to just wish this all away because they hate doing the real work of governing.
People aren’t going to risk putting up a fight to defend their job. If Trump and Musk post goons at the entrance, no employee in their right mind will try to force their way in because they’re legally supposed to be at work. They’ll all stay at home and demand to be paid their salaries, because they were willing to work but were prevented to.
Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Short of real humans locking the doors, just keep showing up.
Doors locked? Work from home.
No system access? OK, well you’re not on paid leave, so does someone preventing you from earning an income have legal authority to do that? Sounds like a lovely lawsuit.
Don’t just roll over and disappear, that’s giving them what they want.
If I’m drawing a salary from you and you don’t give me proper notice and a pink slip, I’ll be all over you like a fly on a ripe turd. I don’t think anybody who’s lawfully employed by the agencies that have been taken over by Trump’s goons are going to let the matter slide and sulk in their corner. It’s just that a job isn’t worth physically resisting said goons.
Nothing as far as I can tell, but the media, and even a lot of people on Lemmy still seem to think they care about the law or feel in any way obligated to abide by it. And I do not get it.
It’s not about this being some sort of firewall to stop him in his tracks or anything, the opportunity for that was last election, and we failed. It’s now about being an effective opposition, just like they try do when we win.
To paraphrase AOC, there needs to be sand in his gears. Yeah, he can push a lot of stuff through anyway, but we definitely want it to be as difficult as possible, costing them extra effort.
Here’s a kinda tired-seeming AOC chit chatting about all this stuff for 90 minutes on livestream:
https://youtu.be/CVgNJf6CsBA
Though the main battle is still over teaching logic and critical thinking to the public and individual civic dialogue imo.
Bingo. It ultimately won’t stop him, but every act of resistance will slow him down, and every act of submission will speed him up. Choose to resist.
Mario Savio
If he’s willing to weaponize the pardon power (which we already know he is), there’s no current way to stop him at all. Anything he does is protected by the ‘presidential act’ ruling, which is untested, but anything his lackeys do can just be pardoned, even pre-emptively before charges are brought. Since the pardon power is absolute and has no oversight, this would, as far as I can tell, stonewall any attempt to stop them unless that attempt is by literally barring the doors as they try to enter. The system was not designed to stand up to a bad actor of this magnitude; the recourse would be an impeachment but that’s not happening unless he oversteps so massively that his own party turns on him.
It provides cover for the resisting people in the agencies. Right now the nazis have the fig leaf of executing an EO when they enter these facilities and do their treason, and when the courts strip that it makes it legal (maybe required?) to bar physically them from the facilities
…at which point they get whichever security forces they want to physically force their way into the building. With weapons.
You’re still thinking they play by the rules when they just don’t.
Unless you’re talking about borrowing ICE, the rest of the feds are also not participating in this so far or are also suing the administration. And the DC police seem to have pretty strong opinions from what I’ve read since '21. The Trump administration has not demonstrated they have the force level to storm these facilities in the face of active opposition and are counting on people just letting them in on their fraudulent authority.
Even if the Trump administration is not compliant, the alternative would be approval of this coup d’etat.
Another alternative is to resist them in mass action.
But that requires effort.
In the end, I suspect he doesn’t have the military sucking his cock. If he starts openly disobeying the rule of law, military officers have an obligation to overthrow him and protect the constitution. That’s the one hope we have left.
Yeah I think you got that right. He barfed on well-respected generals and disrespected veterans so much I don’t think the military really loves Trump all that much.
They’ll never overthrow him. If he can’t fill the top brass ranks with toadies, at most they’ll just refuse to violate posse comitatus without a damn good reason for martial law.
This is what I don’t get.
There is a mechanism for doing this that’s fairly well grounded in the legal system. Go to a federal judge, explain that he’s continuing to break the law even though he’s not supposed to be, and ask for an order authorizing you to go and stop him, by force, with some officially designated force providers.
It’s what you do if someone owes you money and won’t pay. It’s what the cops do when they want to violate someone’s privacy. It’s not the judge’s job to wander off the bench and into the real world and make it happen for you. But there are plenty of people who it is their job.
Get a court order authorizing you to stop the illegality, get some law enforcement or military people to back you up, with the full force of the law behind them, and get to work. This cheat code of “IDC what the judge says” isn’t some new thing Trump discovered. People do it with their child support payments or bench warrants all the time.
We nominated people in government to be our representatives in this democracy, and keep it safe. It is, to a certain extent, their job to make that happen. I don’t get what is all the waiting for “someone” to do something about it.
Cops who work against Trump lose their jobs and risk having their names leaked to the Proud Boys and other J6 thugs. That’s the difference.
The issue is that this is all in Federal Court, and all of the “officially designated force providers” at that level are part of the Executive Branch. So who would agree to enforce this when Trump can just immediately fire them, even if he doesn’t have the legal right to do so? Even the US Marshals, who are intended to enforce stuff like this, are still part of the DoJ under the Attorney General. Can a court compel an AG to take an action if the President can just pardon all of her contempt citations from ignoring it?
Since these are States that are suing, can a Federal judge authorize State police to take control of a Federal building with the purpose of enforcing a Federal order that Federal forces refuse to enforce (and keeping the Muskovites out)?
That’s not strictly true. They could call the DC metro police. They could call the Virginia or Maryland National Guard.
Sure. If you have an order signed by the judge, most police of whatever agency are authorized to back you up. Whether they will is up in the air, in this case where everyone surely knows they’re touching off a shit-storm the true magnitude of which there is no way to know. But it has happened before. State Police backed up Archibald Cox when the FBI was ransacking his office. There are scenarios where one police agency with a judge’s order has faced off against another police agency who is trying to just out-stubborn them, and usually the side with the judge’s order wins. And surely the FBI hates Trump by this point. They could still have a bunch of personnel show up with somebody to enter the Dept. of Education by force, and Trump could call them on scene personally and tell them they’re fired, and they could still say, “Sorry, I’ll need that in writing, I am busy, I have to go now.”
Trump would surely come after the FBI, but he is doing that already. This is like “I can’t leave him, he’ll beat me” when he is already beating you every weekend. If it’s on, let it be on, man. At least keeping it within some kind of legal framework seems like it would be ten times better either than letting him continue to get away with it, or waiting for shit to pop off outside the legal framework.
It would have to be us.
Inevitably, he will defy the courts. And then, I fear, it is time for violence on both sides. “Very fine people”.
Eventually it comes down to the military. If the military decide to park their tanks in front of the white house and shoot or bombs protesters it’s game over. If they decide the president is a traitor and go after him then he’s gone.