'Mafia Boss': Legal experts sound alarm as Trump White House 'sabotages itself with unbridled hostility'

Legal analysts have raised concerns about President Donald Trump's continuing conflict with the judiciary, warning that the administration's disregard for judges is steering the country toward a constitutional crisis.

The Free Press spoke with a number of legal commentators for an article published Sunday, and many questioned the administration's move to defy the Supreme Court over the wrongful deportation of a Maryland man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

Michael W. McConnell, the Director of the Constitutional Law Center, at Stanford Law School said, "The Trump White House is sabotaging itself with its unbridled hostility toward the courts."

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"The Supreme Court has been doing its best to defuse the looming clash with the administration — a confrontation that would wreak certain damage both to the presidency and to the courts, and thus to our constitutional republic," he added.

McConnell said the Court has called out some of the more questionable district court interventions against the administration, insisting on compliance with rules of jurisdiction, while upholding basic principles of due process.

"The best examples are the deportation cases, where the Court reversed one lower court that halted mass deportations for acting without jurisdiction, but in the same order forbade the executive from whisking potential deportees off to foreign lands before they have time to file suit in the proper court and obtain due process. In another, it moderated a district court order to “effectuate” the return of an erroneously deported alien, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, while upholding the order to “facilitate” his return and to “share what it can” with the court about the steps it is taking to bring him back," McConnel said.

He noted that the Trump administration did not take any action to bring back Garcia despite the Court's order and even insulted individual judges, in addition to "floating the bizarre notion of imprisoning American citizens, along with aliens, in foreign jails."

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"These reactions will almost certainly produce the opposite result from what the administration hopes for. Life-tenured judges are not easy to bully," the academic said.

Lawrence Lessig, the Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, also heavily criticized the way Trump was dealing with the courts, likening the president to a "mafia boss."

"We need to recognize — and name —the form of government we are living in right now. Its closest analogue is the Mafia. President Trump is using extortion to achieve his objectives," he said.

"Too many are yielding to his extortion because they believe that to be the less costly alternative. For some it is; for the world, it is not. The only way to respond to a Capo-in-Chief is through full-on resistance, regardless of the cost, for however long it takes," Lessig continued.

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"I mean the word extortion precisely," he said, noting that the president is threatening illegal action in order to induce a deal. "He has threatened to impose huge penalties on universities — without due process of law — as a way to induce them to accept his demands," Lessig said.

Lessig also challenged the notion that the president has the authority to impose emergency and justify such actions. "And though some believe the law technically gives the president the power to declare an 'emergency' when there clearly is none, so as to trigger the power to impose crippling tariffs on friends and opponents alike, I do not believe the law, properly interpreted, gives him that power," he said.

Ed Whelan, a distinguished senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a former law clerk to Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, said he supports many of Trump’s policy goals, but added that "the administration has no coherent legal strategy."

"Its temperamental disposition to see law as politics will not help it win legal battles. And its growing but wildly overblown perception of the judiciary as its enemy portends a stark conflict that will leave us all worse off," he said of the Trump administration.

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