'Attacking each piece': Ex-Trump attorney unveils strategy for 'binding precedent' on executive power
President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump participate in a meet and greet with Supreme Court Justices Thursday, November 8, 2018. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead) Image via Flickr.
Former Donald Trump attorney Tim Parlatore on Monday detailed the administration’s ultimate goal in challenging federal court orders, insisting the president's team wants the U.S. Supreme Court to say “that the executive branch has" (or doesn't have) "the discretion to take these types of actions."
"These types of actions" relate to a number of Trump's executive orders, a slew of court challenges questioning the limits of said orders and the president's response to those decisions.
Parlatore dismissed concerns that, as Jonathan Chait in the Atlantic wrote Monday, “the United States is sleepwalking into a constitutional crisis,” insisting instead that “people in the media” are trying to “you know, catastrophize that [Trump’s] going to do something and create a constitutional crisis.”
READ MORE: 'You don’t have to talk to me like that!' CNN panel melts down over Trump’s executive power
Parlatore insisted arguments from Trump allies questioning the power of the courts amount to a mere "litigation tactic” as opposed to “a statement that we're just going to, you know, ignore the judiciary branch.”
As CNN legal analyst Eli Honig observed Monday, the Trump administration has recently received “a slew of really bad rulings” and is “making a lot of noise” about defying them.
Asked “which of [the] cases” he thinks Trump "cares most deeply about,” Parlatore argued all of the court decisions “are kind of related.”
READ MORE: 'Welcome to Trump’s America': 1 dead after Motley Crue lead singer’s jet collides with plane in AZ
“Even though they're attacking each individual little piece here, ultimately it does go to the to the issue of, ‘How much discretion does the executive branch have?’” Parlatore said. "So I think that, you know, any one of these cases, you know, could potentially go up to the Supreme Court. In fact, the Supreme Court could take a lot of these and just kind of consolidate them.”
“Really what [the Trump administration wants] is, you know, whichever lawsuit it comes out of, they're going to want a decision that says that the executive branch has the discretion to take these types of actions, and then that decision will be binding precedent on all the others.”
Watch the video below or at this link.
