Jess Bravin
speaker
68 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard May 2025
Jess Bravin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Well, they want courts to stay out of their way. I mean, their messaging, we don't know what kind of subliminal or psychological effect, but this is a very, very combative administration. I mean, their rhetoric is not, we respectfully disagree with the court and intend to appeal. Their rhetoric is this judge is a lunatic and should be impeached.
So they are sending a message to the courts that, you know, stay out of our way, just as they've done to other opponents. They don't seem to have a concept of a loyal opposition. You know, any opposition is by definition disloyal, I think, in their view. So, yeah, there's that. Now, that's the general, I think, atmosphere that they want to promote.
In terms of their legal objectives, they have a very, very strong view of executive power. They know that several members of the Supreme Court share that view, at least in theory, about how the separation of powers should be interpreted. And they are hoping that the cases that inevitably are arising from many of their very aggressive assertions
will lead to new precedents that bless their approach to running the government. So yes, I think that's their legal objective, and I think they're likely to win on some of their arguments. I can't say they're going to win on all of them, but some of them, I think they have a very good chance of prevailing.
There certainly is. And the Supreme Court itself has raised questions about the propriety of nationwide injunctions. It is a good question, and it is one that could be resolved in a couple of ways. One, the Supreme Court itself can set out new guidelines for when those kinds of injunctions are appropriate, and also Congress can.
Congress can set the rules for federal courts, and I think there is some talk of doing that. There is a serious legal question about should a single judge, often picked because the parties who are filing the lawsuit think that judge will be sympathetic, be able to stymie an entire initiative of the government.
Well, I think the answer is, of course, it depends. I mean, is it a kind of soft noncompliance, which actually is not that unusual? I mean, you know, there are a lot of court orders that don't get fully carried out by the government, you know, all the time. And courts don't have a perfect way of assessing whether that goes on.
Or is it just, you know, a flat-out defiance of a Supreme Court directive? As you said, the president has not gone that far at this point. Some of his nominees, though, left open the possibility that there were circumstances when they wouldn't have to comply with a court order.
This came up at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing when the nominee for solicitor general and a nominee for assistant attorney general were asked flat out, you know, are there circumstances when you don't have to obey a court order? And they hedged They said, well, we don't want to talk about hypotheticals, or there's a big debate about that, or they kind of left it open.
And interestingly, there was even a Republican senator, John Kennedy of Louisiana, who scolded them.
So even a Republican senator pushed back on that. So I don't know if they have a decision about what they're going to do or how important it is. If they believe that there is a core national security power of the president that is at issue and that the safety of the country is at stake, would they think that are grounds to defy a court order? I don't know.
That is definitely a novel policy of the Trump administration to target individual law firms in this way. The justification is that the president doesn't trust these law firms and he has cited their activities against him personally, like in an order that he issued against the law firm Paul Weiss.
He named one of their lawyers and said, this person, you know, tried to like gin up a prosecution of me and he is a untrustworthy, crooked lawyer. And so it is the president's determination that these law firms are security threats and can't be trusted. Perkins has gone into court to get that order lifted and won a temporary order lifting portions of the president's order.
But it is, again, a very strong message that the administration views people who file lawsuits against it or people who have taken legal action against the president as enemies. and they are not pulling punches in using their powers.
Well, I mean, we don't know yet, but we're not seeing a very robust response from the bar. We're not seeing a kind of unified, defiant retort to the president saying how outrageous. You're seeing, you know, some individual statements, some, you know, bar associations and what have you. It's not gone unnoticed.
But there's not the kind of outrage and tremendous resistance that one might have expected if this happened in Trump's first term. I mean, some of these law firms are not even fighting these orders in court.
Well, that decision is playing into it all the time. For one, the government is raising it in a lot of its legal briefs as evidence of the president's power to command subordinates to not have any kind of judicial review of what he does in his direction of the executive branch, how it's outside the realm of courts to examine.
So they're definitely bringing it up in many cases as precedent that supports their view of executive authority. Also, of course, the president himself knows now
that nothing he does while he is acting as president can ever lead to any kind of legal liability for him so to the extent he wasn't fully emboldened before he is now so it's quite consequential and of course that decision may be the reason that donald trump is president again in the first place i mean you know had that had the court ruled the other way he might have you know been put on trial or or you know perhaps history would have gone in a different direction
That decision cleared the way for him to campaign through the end of 2024 and get elected and then now use, employ this very, very broad view of executive power. So I'd say it's really central to everything that the president is doing.
Showing 21–40 of 68 · page 2 of 4
← Previous
Next →