Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued a rare statement Tuesday criticizing attacks by President Trump and his allies on federal judges. “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” he said. Roberts’s statement came after Trump called for the impeachment of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who ordered the Trump administration to stop using the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport immigrants. On Saturday, the administration ignored Boasberg’s order to turn around three deportation flights bound for El Salvador. We speak with The Nation’s justice correspondent Elie Mystal on the Trump-led breakdown of constitutional order. “There’s not a coming constitutional crisis,” says Mystal. “We are in a constitutional crisis right now.”
Yes, this is the point where the US became a fascist state. Not the genocide of natives, slavery, Japanese internment, Jim Crow Laws, CIA assassinationprobably of a president lacking in imperial ambition, emplacement and backing of anticommunist dictatorships worldwide, or explicit imperial wars for nonrenewable resources. No no, this right here was the turning point.
You didn’t read or listen to the interview did you
ELIE MYSTAL: So, Amy, people have told me from the jump, from November 5th, when he was elected, that the courts would save us, that the courts would restrain him, that the courts would be the final guardrail preventing his military dictatorship. And I have said from the jump that the courts will not save us, that they cannot save us, because they cannot enforce their own decisions. The executive enforces the courts’ decisions. And if you have an executive like Trump who is willing to ignore court orders, then there’s nothing courts can do.
So, part of my question, Amy, is to turn it around back on the other people who were telling me for months that the courts would save us: What do y’all got now? What’s your plan now? Now that the courts have issued their order and Trump has ignored their orders, what’s plan B? Because plan A was the courts saving us, and that was never going to work.
