Trump's Haste Begets Lawlessness
The president treats legal constraints as inconveniences that can be overridden by executive fiat.
Last week, a federal court ruled that President Donald Trump had exceeded his statutory authority by imposing a raft of tariffs based on the "national emergency" supposedly caused by the longstanding U.S. trade deficit. Those tariffs are part of an alarming pattern: In his rush to enact his agenda, Trump frequently treats legal constraints as inconveniences that can be overridden by executive fiat.
The U.S. Court of International Trade rejected Trump's reliance on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to justify sweeping import taxes he announced in February and April. The three-judge panel said that 48-year-old law, which does not even mention tariffs and had never been used this way before, does not authorize the president to "impose unlimited tariffs on goods from nearly every country in the world."
That decision did not affect tariffs that Trump has imposed or proposed under different statutes, such as his taxes on cars, steel, and aluminum. But by invoking the IEEPA, Trump hoped to avoid the specific rationales and sometimes lengthy procedures those laws mandate.
Trump's immigration crackdown features similar legal shortcuts. After he asserted the power to summarily deport alleged members of a Venezuelan gang as "alien enemies," for example, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that they had a due process right to contest that designation.
That decision did not address Trump's dubious interpretation of the 227-year-old Alien Enemies Act. But several federal judges, including a Trump appointee, subsequently concluded that it made no sense to portray gang members as "natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects" of a "hostile nation or government" that had launched an "invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States."
As with tariffs, Trump had a more legally defensible option: deportation of unauthorized residents under the Immigration and Nationality Act. But in both cases, he chose the course he thought would avoid pesky procedural requirements.
Something similar happened when Immigration and Customs Enforcement suddenly terminated thousands of records in the database of foreign students with visas authorizing them to attend American universities. Although that move was described as part of a "Student Criminal Alien Initiative," it affected many people without disqualifying criminal records—in some cases, without any criminal records at all.
Those terminations "reflect an instinct that has become prevalent in our society to effectuate change: move fast and break things," U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White wrote when he issued a preliminary injunction against the initiative on May 22. "That instinct must be checked when it conflicts with established principles of law."
The same instinct is apparent in Trump's conflict with Harvard University. The administration froze more than $2 billion in federal research grants to Harvard, ostensibly because the university, by tolerating antisemitism on campus, had failed to meet its "responsibility to uphold civil rights laws."
That decision ignored the legal process for rescinding federal funding based on such alleged violations. The process includes "a lot of steps, but they're important," the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression notes. "They protect students by making sure colleges live up to their obligations. And they protect colleges by making sure they have an opportunity to contest the allegations as well as a chance to make things right."
Trump's disregard for the law is coupled with angry dismay at judicial review. As he sees it, any judge who dares to impede his will is a "Radical Left Lunatic," a "troublemaker" and "agitator" who "should be IMPEACHED!!!"
After the tariff ruling, a White House spokesman argued that the court charged with interpreting and applying trade laws had no business doing that. "It is not for unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency," he insisted.
Contrary to that take, "it is emphatically the province and duty" of the judicial branch to "say what the law is," as Chief Justice John Marshall put it 222 years ago. Especially when the executive branch is headed by someone who does not seem to care.
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