'King of America': Trump's new orders spark crisis

The U.S. Supreme Court has been favorable to President Donald Trump in a wide range of rulings — from the presidential immunity decision Trump v. the United States to overturning Roe v. Wade with Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. Yet Trump is furious with the High Court for opposing his policies on tariffs, birthright citizenship and other issues. And according to legal expert Kimberly Wehle — a law professor and former federal prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) — Trump is being unapologetically brazen in his willingness to defy the justices, some of whom he appointed during his first presidency.

Writing for the conservative website The Bulwark, Wehle lays out some of the SCOTUS rulings that Trump is thumbing his nose at.

"In his quest to become the king of America," Wehle explains in her August 10 analysis, "Donald Trump made it clearer than ever, last week, that he doesn't really care what the Supreme Court has to say. First, he has decided to renew his effort to fire Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve Board governor he first tried to fire a year ago. The Supreme Court, in a 5–4 decision this June, smacked down that previous attempt to fire her and have her immediately removed from the board, concluding that the president could fire her 'for cause' but that he had failed to follow the legally required termination process…. Second, and even more troublingly, Trump finally did what he's been gunning for since his first term: He defied the Court's authority to issue binding rulings against him."

The law professor continues, "Rejecting another 5-4 ruling from June, Trump, last week, issued two executive orders purporting to deny birthright citizenship to several categories of individuals who are squarely covered by his sweeping loss before the Court. In Trump v. Barbara, the majority held that babies born in the United States are automatic citizens under 'the ordinary meaning of the text' of the relevant part of the 14th Amendment."

By "flouting a Supreme Court ruling," Wehle warns, Trump "has quietly declared yet another 'new normal' for the vanishing rule of law in the United States."

"Already, he has defied lower federal court orders dozens of times," the legal scholar explains. "The U.S. Supreme Court was next up. One has to wonder whether crossing this red line will finally convince holdout optimists to give up the pretense that America is still a functioning constitutional democracy."