If the president’s authority to make personnel decisions in the executive branch is subject to judicial veto, can a district court judge veto bills? Order Congress to adjourn or to pass a law? Make treaties? Perhaps we could have all 677 district court judges give their own State of the Union addresses next January!
"Democrats, those stalwart champions of democracy who tried to keep Donald Trump off the ballot, have an endlessly malleable understanding of whose view prevails whenever disputes arise between any combination of Congress, the courts, the president and the states. It’s almost as if they decide based not on any fixed principle, but on whose side they take.
"When Joe Biden was president, he openly defied Supreme Court rulings — and bragged about doing so. Despite the court repeatedly telling him he had no authority to forgive student loans, he kept doing it. “The Supreme Court blocked it,” he said, “but that didn’t stop me.” No complaints from the left.
"When Barack Obama was president, federal control of immigration was absolute! Arizona was said to be prohibited from following federal law because the president had decided not to follow the law. Suddenly, every Democrat was talking about the supremacy clause and claiming Arizona had been overtaken by Nazis.
"Eventually, the Supreme Court upheld Arizona’s so-called “Papers Please” law, and the hysterics, confident that no one would remember their smug assurances that the law was unconstitutional, went right back to uttering their weighty pronouncements.
"But when Trump was abiding by federal law in issuing what liberals called “the Muslim ban” (that, oddly enough, never mentioned Muslims), district courts and Trump’s own acting attorney general decided that their interpretation of a president’s duties should prevail over his.
"They were heroes! At least until the Supreme Court upheld Trump’s non-Muslim-mentioning Muslim ban. It seems that — contra every editorial page in America — federal law expressly grants the president authority to exclude aliens if, in his opinion, their presence “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”
"Whereupon everyone who’d screamed that we were living through a “constitutional crisis” (defined as “anything Democrats dislike”), “authoritarianism,” “tyranny” and “Trump’s Immigration Ban Is Illegal” (a New York Times headline) pretended not to notice the decision and never spoke of it again." . . .
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