Comment by taylodl
9 days ago
Trump is breaking the law, but Congress has no interest in holding him accountable - and they're the only institution Congress specifies for having the authority to hold the president accountable.
So...Trump is breaking the law and getting away with it. What else is new?
> Trump is breaking the law,
Yes
He has immunity
This is different from immunity. What’s supposed to happen is the action is stopped, as though the EOs never happened. It’s not illegal to issue illegal EOs, they just can’t be followed. The only real point sanctions come is when a judge says “stop” and the people involved don’t. This is violating a court order, which is contempt of court. But Trump wouldn’t be violating it, Musk would.
Yeah, but contempt of court still is enforced by the executive (the court can order enforcement, but it’s the DOJ [US Marshal’s Service] that does arrests and the DOJ [Bureau of Prisons] that holds those arrested.)
BUT... even if the executive is under legal theory constitutionally unitary, it isn’t actually unitary, it consists of individual people who act based on their own perception of legitimacy, and when the President abandons the principle of government of law and not arbitrary individual will in dealing with the courts, well, that also threatens the theoretical infrastructure that binds the people carrying guns in various executive departments to his authority, and we can very quickly end up in one of those highly unpredictable periods of history that produces lots of really neat stories to read about afterwards but is somewhat less pleasant to live through.
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