Is Trump Destroying or Restoring the Constitution?

We have watched the skirmishes that have erupted between the judiciary and the executive branch, particularly since Trump’s election. Those battles have escalated to a full-scale war with unelected partisan judges who refuse to let President Trump govern this country. Although this looks like a war between the president and the courts, it’s really about the Left vs. the Right. And the Constitution is caught in the middle.

Destroying the Constitution

The Progressives, especially under President Woodrow Wilson, have a long history of compromising and misinterpreting the Constitution to meet their own agendas:

Progressives demanded that Congress delegate its lawmaking authority to supposedly ‘neutral’ and ‘apolitical’ experts. They then sought to shelter these professionals and technicians from the play of raw democratic forces by providing them with robust protections against presidential removal. Progressives take not as a flaw but as a positive design feature the ability of these independent agencies to subvert a presidential agenda and frustrate the majoritarian preferences that lie behind it.

When we study the actions of the judiciary carefully, the political Left claims that Trump is creating a constitutional crisis; in fact, the crisis is an ideological one. The term “constitutional crisis” is meant to cause alarm, not define the facts of what is occurring. From John Yoo, former U.S. Assistant Attorney General:

‘I confess that I have no clear definition of a constitutional crisis,’ he said, adding that he does have clear ideas about what is not a constitutional crisis: ‘It cannot just be a disagreement over the meaning of the constitution. It cannot be just a fight between the branches of government. … Not only do we have these conflicts all the time, but the Framers designed the separation of powers — according to James Madison — to encourage the three branches to fight.’ Yoo, currently a visiting scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, sees it differently, and told me claims of a constitutional crisis today ‘are examples of the hyper-partisan policies of our time than any real assault on the Constitution.’

What is actually going on? The judges are ruling in ways that deliberately hamstring the president:

Whether it’s U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg attempting to block the Trump administration from deporting suspected illegal alien gang members to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, or U.S. District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander blocking the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing Social Security Administration data, federal judges have repeatedly stepped in to undermine executive authority. [snip] America increasingly lives under a Judicial Oligarchy, where the district court system that functions below the Supreme Court has assumed power far beyond its intended limited role, subverting the executive and legislative branches to impose a policy agenda dictated not by elected representatives but by unelected judges

Can we expect the Republicans in the Senate to stand behind Trump, or will they cave in to the activist judges? Chuck Schumer weighs in:

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told the New York Times that the question of whether Trump defies courts is what wakes him up at ‘2, 3 in the morning.’ ‘I believe Republican senators, on this issue, will stand up,’ Schumer said of a handful of his colleagues on the other side of the aisle. ‘About five or six have said publicly they will work to uphold the courts, and to uphold the law if Trump tries to break it. And we can do that legislatively if we have to.’

Except Congress has done absolutely nothing to clarify the situation.

Progressives continue to use legal terms to criticize Trump:

It is, of course, too early to offer definitive verdicts, but the first few weeks of the Trump administration may well constitute the most severe attack on the rule of law in the United States since confederate armed forces began lobbing artillery shells into Fort Sumter in 1861. Aided by a supine Congress dominated by his own political party, a determined president—with a long track record of disrespect for the law and the judicial system—is attempting to enhance his own power by upending institutional arrangements outlined in our Constitution and gradually constructed over the course of many decades.

These attacks focus on the dislike for Trump and his agenda, rather than basing her arguments on facts. Aside from the author’s use of hyperbole, comparing Trump’s actions to the South in the Civil War, no evidence is given that he has attacked the rule of law. He hasn’t shown disrespect for the law, but only for the attorneys and justices who have practiced lawfare. And in fact, he is trying to re-establish the meaning of the Constitution that the Founders intended. Since his approach is unconventional, the progressives insist he must be wrong.

Restoring the Constitution

Given that the lower courts are trying to distort the Constitution to meet their agenda, here’s what Trump is trying to do to restore the Constitution. Insisting that agencies are not independent and are subject to his management is one strategy:

A Supreme Court rejection of independent agencies would mark an enormous shift of power away from the administrative state and back into the hands of the president. It would restore political accountability for public policy choices to the elected branches. And it would bring the dominant understanding of the executive power closer to the constitutional text and the prevailing understanding of the Founders. The federal bureaucracy often resists the wishes of the president and Congress — and may do so by progressive design. Agencies can refuse to carry out presidential directives: They can slow-walk regulatory initiatives, they can conceal important information from the White House or presidential appointees, they can carry out operations that they keep ‘off the books.’ This friction, which makes it hard or even impossible for a president to carry out his agenda, is intensified when the agency is headed by a leader or board that has no fear of removal.

Meanwhile, a rule called Humphrey’s Executor has unconstitutionally limited the power of the president over the heads of agencies:

Humphrey’s Executor has not stood the test of time. In Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (2020), the Court held that Congress could not vest the power to enforce the laws in the hands of a single agency head who is protected from presidential removal. The Court wrote: In our constitutional system, the executive power belongs to the president, and that power generally includes the ability to supervise and remove the agents who wield executive power in his stead . . . While we have previously upheld limits on the president’s removal authority in certain contexts, we decline to do so when it comes to principal officers who, acting alone, wield significant executive power.

President Trump must continue his work to restore the Constitution, in spite of the pushback from the judiciary:

If the deliberate legal obstruction of Trump’s presidency continues without significant pushback, either by winning legal appeals, impeaching partisan justices, eliminating some federal courts, openly defying court orders, or the Supreme Court granting the Trump administration’s request to narrow the scope of the district court injunctions, the judiciary will effectively cement itself as America’s unelected ruling class.

Trump is simply trying to take back our country. He must be successful.

[Originally published in American Thinker]