'He's trying to scare everybody': Expert explains Trump's 'lawless' war on federal judges
President Donald Trump continues to angrily rail against federal judges who are blocking his executive orders, especially U.S. District Judge James Boasberg — the Barack Obama appointee who temporarily halted deportations of Venezuelan nationals suspected of being associated with the violent Tren de Aragua gang.
Many civil libertarians applauded Boasberg's order, arguing that the deportees were not given due process — and that some of them may have been wrongly accused of having a Tren de Aragua connection. But Trump is calling for Boasberg to be impeached.
Harvard University law professor Laurence Tribe defended Boasberg during a Saturday morning, March 22 appearance on MSNBC, describing Trump's calls for impeachment as a "moment of crisis" and an attack on the United States' system of checks and balances.
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Tribe told MSNBC host Ali Velshi, "It's ominous. He's trying to scare everybody, saying: You better follow my orders, or we'll never know what's going to happen. And then, judges fear being shot. All kinds of terrible things are going on."
The Harvard legal scholar noted that MAGA Republicans "loved injunctions" from federal judges when they involved executive orders from former President Joe Biden.
Tribe told Velshi, "Boasberg either had to throw his hands up and say: I can't enforce the law — or he had to say: Turn those planes around. That's what he did. And now, we're told by Trump: Oh no, these nationwide injunctions are terrible. It is hypocritical. It is lawless, and it is a provocation…. The Chief Justice (John Roberts) rightly says: You can criticize judges all you want, but don't threaten to impeach them and put a target on their backs for doing their job."
Boasberg, Tribe notes, is a "well-respected judge," adding that nothing Boasberg has done is impeachable.
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"Once you start threatening to remove judges because you think they got it wrong in a particular case, however important, the whole idea of an independent judiciary crumbles," Tribe warned. "One of the pillars of the rule of law that prevents us from becoming a complete dictatorship — or an oligarchy, or an autocracy of some other kind — is the idea that the judiciary is independent. It doesn't always have the last word."
Tribe continued, "You can amend the Constitution if you don't agree with it, as I think we should amend it to get rid of that absolute and sweeping immunity that was given to presidents for committing crimes in office. But you don't threaten to remove the judge. And when you do, and couple it with the kind of provocative, violent rhetoric that we are hearing now, you have things like Judge Salas' son being killed by someone who was trying to shoot her because he didn't agree with her decision. That's not how a country that is based on law and order and self-government can ever survive. And that's why I think the virus that has been spreading ever since the January 6th insurrection has got to be combated with all the tools at our disposal."
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