MSNBC Columnist Steve Benen warned political and legal observers to be wary of the Trump administration “moving the goalposts” on obeying laws.
Benen pointed out how eagerly the administration is tempted to disregard court rulings, but he took particular umbrage with U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi complaining that too many people were suing the president, even as Trump upends traditional rights Americans have come to expect.
“Just since January 20th, we’ve had over 170 lawsuits filed against us. That should be the constitutional crisis right there, 50 injunctions,” Bondi recently told “Fox News Sunday.”
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White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also complained about the flood of suits the second Trump administration has attracted in its unprecedented first three months. But Bondi is an attorney with years of legal experience who also served as Florida's attorney general before joining the Trump administration. Benen called her characterization of Americans taking “their legal concerns to the courts” as a "constitutional crisis" considerably “more outrageous than most.”
“It reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how the American system works,” Benen wrote. “In this country, if you believe the government is abusing its legal authority, you have the right to file a lawsuit and bring your concerns to a judge, who is expected to adjudicate the matter fairly and rule on the legal merits. To hear the attorney general tell it, however, if Americans exercise their legal rights by filing such lawsuits, they’re necessarily creating a ‘crisis.’”
It gave Benen no comfort that when the Fox host asked Bondi if Trump would defy a court order, Bondi replied, “He was overwhelmingly elected by an overwhelming majority of the United States citizens to be our commander-in-chief.”
That’s not an answer, of course, and Trump complying with the “White House’s interpretation of the law” is “hardly reassuring,” Benen said. Additionally, those who pretend to be concerned about the politicization of federal law enforcement should probably take note of “the degree to which the line between the attorney general and the White House press office has grown awfully blurry of late.”
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Click here to read Benen's full column.