'Lawless': Legal experts say most of Trump’s actions 'clearly violate the Constitution'
01 February
Various legal experts across the country are in agreement that President Donald Trump has largely ignored the United States' founding document during his first two weeks back in the White House.
The Guardian recently reported that Trump's executive actions have caused significant alarm among Constitutional law experts, who argue that the new administration has been making a mockery of federal law. Harvard Law professor emeritus Laurence Tribe called Trump the "most lawless and scofflaw president we have ever seen in the history of the United States." He described the first 11 days of Trump's second term as a "blitzkrieg on the law and the Constitution." Tribe added that the freeze on federal grants and loans — which two different federal judges have shot down — was a "clear usurpation of a coordinate branch’s [Congress’s] exclusive power of the purse."
"The very fact that the illegal actions have come out with the speed of a rapidly firing Gatling gun makes it very hard for people to focus on any one of them. That’s obviously part of the strategy," Tribe said.
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Erwin Chemerinsky, who is the dean of the University of California-Berkeley School of Law, agreed with that characterization. He told the Guardian that a "stunning number of [Trump's] executive actions clearly violate the Constitution and federal law."
"I cannot think of any president who has ever so ignored the constitution as extensively in the first 10 days of office as this," he said. "I certainly doubt that any president has done so much lawless[sic] so quickly that affects so many people."
On Trump's first day in office, he signed an executive order attempting to strip children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants of birthright citizenship. U.S. District Judge John Cougheneur — who was appointed to the bench by Republican President Ronald Reagan — called the order "blatantly unconstitutional" in a ruling temporarily halting it, as the order conflicts with the 14th Amendment.
Aside from his executive orders, Trump has also ignored federal law in some of his mass firings, like his sudden dismissal of more than a dozen inspectors general (independent officials who monitor corruption within federal agencies). Those firings even attracted opposition from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee and is considered one of Trump's top allies in the U.S. Senate. Grassley recently co-signed a letter with Judiciary Committee ranking member Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) calling on Trump to reinstate the fired inspectors general on an acting basis until the statutory 30-day Congressional notification period had passed and specific reasons were given for their firings.
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Click here to read the Guardian's report in full.