Trump official repeatedly refuses to follow judges' orders

President Donald Trump has already built a reputation for defying court orders, but now Politico reports his top Homeland Security commander, Secretary Markwayne Mullin, repeatedly confirmed to senators on Tuesday that he, too, is loath to accept court decisions that he does not like.

“If we didn’t think courts were politicized, then I would probably be able to answer that,” Mullin said. “But we see courts over and over again that use their bench for their political opinion, not just the rule of law.”

Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, the top Democrat on the panel that funds DHS, pointed out to Mullin that even Republican-appointed judges have accused the department of violating almost 100 court orders this year. Murphy added that the Trump administration’s noncompliance as the main factor fueling the ongoing partisan feud over DHS funding that led to the longest funding lapse in U.S. history this year.

“This is a really important discussion for us to have, because this is — whether you want to believe it or not — at the root of our disagreement,” Murphy told him, adding, “it is very hard for us to figure out how to fund an agency that is violating the law.”

Somehow, Mullin, a former Oklahoma Republican senator, argued that DHS “will never break the Constitution, and we’re not going to break the law,” despite claiming they will not follow court orders they don’t like.

Court judges have recently handed Trump a flurry of losses. A federal judge on Monday issued a temporary restraining order against the National Park Service, ordering it to not interfere with a group that had been flying an “8647” flag in Washington, D.C. Common restaurant slang for “eighty-six” goes back nearly a century, the judge noted, saying that it meant “to throw out” or “to get rid of.” He made no reference to Trump’s politicized DOJ lobbing investigations and indictments against Trump perceived enemy former FBI head James Comey for posting pictures of the same numbers with seashells on a beach.

Anther federal judge recently dismissed a Justice Department lawsuit seeking access to Arizona’s detailed voter registration records, dealing another blow to the Trump administration’s national effort to obtain expansive voter data. And still another judge recently ordered that Trump to remove his name from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and that he could not close it for what the Trump administration said were two years of renovations.

“[If] you look at the big constitutional suits against this administration — big separation-of-powers issues, big violations of law. There are hundreds of those cases, I think north of 700 in the courts, and the administration has been losing those 2-to-1 in the lower courts,” said Trump’s ex-security expert Miles Taylor on MS NOW.