A Tough Week for the Rule of Law

 

I don’t want to depress everyone, but I believe in being a realist. And it hasn’t been a great week in America. Here’s just a partial list of things within the scope of our law/politics lens that have happened:

• Trump’s Justice Department is on a revenge-fueled spate of new activities. According to people who “could not publicly discuss details of the investigation and spoke to The Associated Press on Friday on the condition of anonymity,” Pam Bondi has assigned Ed Martin, the failed DC-U.S. Attorney nominee who now works in Main Justice (although he has no prior prosecutorial experience), to oversee criminal mortgage fraud investigations into New York AG Tish James and California Senator Adam Schiff.
• DOJ policy prohibits disclosing investigations, except in very limited situations, for reasons we’ve discussed over the years. The apparent use of anonymous cutouts to inform the public that two Democratic political figures who have, coincidentally, tangled with Trump are being investigated is a rank effort to tarnish their reputations. (And so reminiscent of Trump, who has repeatedly asked for investigations to be announced—for example, in his call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that led to his first impeachment, or his request that DOJ announce an investigation into voter fraud following the 2020 election so he could take it from there.)
• If these cases were viable, you’d expect to see them being investigated by the offices where alleged crimes occurred. DOJ also seems to be investigating James’ investigation into Trump—the one that resulted in his criminal convictions in New York state court. Her lawyer, Abbe Lowell, called it “the most blatant and desperate example of this administration carrying out the president’s political retribution campaign.” Schiff’s attorney, Preet Bharara (who, full disclosure, I co-host Cafe’s Insider Podcast with), attacked the allegations against the Senator as “transparently false, stale, and long debunked,” and called Martin “brazenly partisan.” None of this is normal.

• Usually, the government is extremely slow to respond to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and frequently, the answer is that the information is privileged and can’t be disclosed. So when employees at American embassies in Denmark and Greenland were directed to provide information that could be used in a FOIA request—including both official and personal communications involving Donald Trump’s crazy proposal that Greenland should become part of the U.S., Trump Jr.’s one-day visit to Greenland, and any communications containing the name “Trump”—there was concern that some kind of loyalty purge was underway. This is not normal.
• A 2-1 decision in the D.C. Circuit has deprived Judge Boasberg of jurisdiction to proceed with his inquiry into whether Trump administration officials should be held in criminal contempt for violating his orders and sending 130 Venezuelan men to CECOT prison in El Salvador in March. The two judges in the majority, Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao, are both Trump appointees to a court that has long been a feeder court to the U.S. Supreme Court. That decision could be reheard by the entire circuit sitting en banc, or an appeal to SCOTUS could be attempted.
• But for now, the contempt proceeding—this is the case where the government’s best has been that they didn’t have to comply with the Judge’s order because their planes were out of U.S. airspace before he entered it in writing—will end without additional action against government lawyers. The dissenting judge, Obama appointee Cornelia Pillard, wrote that the majority’s decision was legally unjustified and “a grave disservice” to Judge Boasberg, who the Trump administration has gone after with an ethics complaint.
• Federal judges should not whitewash the government’s disgraceful behavior in the case involving the deportees, unless they intend to cede all the power of the Article III branch of government, the judiciary, to the Article II branch, the presidency. It’s the judiciary’s job to sanction any party that violates court orders, including the White House, and if they won’t, there is no one else who can.
• Craziness in Texas continues, with the aggressive political use of redistricting. Shortly after Texas Democratic state legislators left the state for places like Illinois in hopes of denying Republicans the opportunity to pass a plan that would gerrymander the state’s congressional map and produce more Republican members of Congress in the 2026 election, the state's Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, went to court to try to remove some of them from office.
• This is rank political maneuvering, from the gerrymandering effort itself to the jostling over which Texas politician can be the toughest on the Democrats. Paxton can’t decide if he hates Democrat Beto O’Rourke or Republican Senator John Cornyn more. All of this looks like a beauty pageant designed to see who can win Donald Trump’s vote for a turn in the national limelight.

There is so much more. For one thing, Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted child sexual predator, is in a prison camp in a minimum-security environment instead of in prison where she belongs. Sex offenders don’t qualify for these camp facilities, and it’s a slap in the face to victims. The administration controls Maxwell’s conditions of confinement, which means Donald Trump can decide where she is held. She’s learned the lesson. Her improved circumstances are not only not normal for a sex offender, but they violate Bureau of Prisons regulations. Her move would have required a waiver from someone very high up in the Justice Department. No confirmation yet on who that was. The bottom line is that this administration continues to cross over red lines that signal a functioning democracy.

There’s a lot to keep track of and, as we’ve discussed before, it can get overwhelming. Right now, it’s a full-time job just trying to keep up with the headlines. We are doing our best here, and we’ll continue to do that.

But it was jarring, given all the news today, to walk through La Guardia airport where everything felt…normal. We can lose this democracy if we don’t fight for it.

In order to resist what Trump is doing in our country, you need to be informed; you need to know what’s at stake. Even in a week like this one, when it’s gut-wrenching to try and take in what the Trump administration is doing, it’s our duty to witness it, to share what we learn with others, to resist, to refuse to give up.

We’ll keep doing that. We are not fighting the fight to preserve democracy alone; we are doing it in the company of other patriots—true patriots, not fake ones. Every small step we take counts. Some weeks are going to be difficult and full of bad news, but other weeks, if we persevere, will be ones where we make progress. Don’t give up.

In times like these, knowledge truly is power. Subscribe to Civil Discourse and get clear, reliable insight into the law and politics shaping our future—so you’re not in the dark when it matters the most.

We’re in this together,

-Joyce Vance