Ruth Marcus
speaker
58 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Ruth Marcus’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Well, TBD. Trump's legal strategy has been backfiring, I think, demonstrably in the lower courts. On what kind of cases? Everything from challenging DEI orders to challenging the orders against law firms to challenging the administration's attempt to undo birthright citizenship to challenging putting USAID and every other federal agency that distributes grants into the wood chipper.
But I'm talking about orders from Reagan-appointed judges, from Bush-appointed judges, both Bushes, from, yes, Democratic-appointed judges. But we do have to say, acknowledge that we have this thing called the Supreme Court, which is in fact supreme.
And we had gotten until this last few days, very few tea leaves from the Supreme Court on how it is going to think about this blizzard of Trump litigation. So there have been several orders from the Supreme Court in the last few days that were surprising to me. I thought the Supreme Court was going to send a message to the Trump administration, back off, guys.
If you come running to us and call everything an emergency, nothing is going to be an emergency. So let these things go through the normal course and we'll get to it down the road. That's not what's happened. I don't think anybody expected that the legal strategy was going to be this intense, this fast, this broad based. In addition, the kind of fundamental rules.
The worst sin you can commit in federal court is to be rude to the judge. This administration, they use language about judges. They accused Judge Boasberg in the district court of micromanaging.
Yes, and who President Trump called for his impeachment. Not going to happen, but a rather extraordinary thing to do. How do we know it's extraordinary? Because the Chief Justice of the United States felt moved to weigh in and say, excuse me, this is not a good idea to be calling for impeachment of judges. And the...
The administration, time after time, has come into court with really preposterous legal theories offered up by lawyers who do not know the facts of the cases before them. When did these flights take off? Can't say. How many people were on these flights? Can't really tell you that. Judges do not take well to that. And when you get the judge in a bad mood, he or she may tend to rule against you.
The court said, Judge Boasberg, you issued this order saying stop these flights. The problematic thing that the court said was, okay, you Venezuelans who have sued in Judge Boasberg's court, you're in the wrong court. You need to be in court where you're being held, which is in Texas.
You need to be using a different theory of law, which is bringing a case under what's called habeas corpus as a practical matter, uh, Things would be much better off for these Venezuelan plaintiffs if they remained in Judge Boasberg's court.
I think this is the legal doctrine of oopsie. You may remember that the president of El Salvador famously tweeted after the Venezuelans arrived. He tweeted oopsie. And that's a little bit what the administration is saying in the case of this Salvadoran man, which is oopsie. We made a mistake, but he's in El Salvador, so can't really... fix that. First of all, of course they can fix that.
But I think the thing that is important about this case is not just that it seems like this absolutely scary moment that is happening to this poor guy who was living a perfectly normal suburban life in Maryland. If we take this theory of the case to be true, that there's no recourse to be had once he's in El Salvador, that could happen to any of us.
They could pick you or me up on the street, even though we're American citizens, and do much the same to us.
There is going to be a set of cases that come to the court. And the Trump administration, from my point of view, is pretty much guaranteed to win some of them. I'm thinking about cases that challenge the ability of the president to fire the commissioners of independent agencies. That's going to be just a clear win for President Trump. But
There's going to be other cases in which I think it's very clear the administration is going to outright lose. The clearest one to me involves its effort to unilaterally, through executive order of all things, rewrite the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship. Trump knows he can't get this through Congress, has issued an executive order.
Every court at every level that has looked at it has said this is blatantly unconstitutional. There was a Reagan-appointed judge who basically said to the Justice Department lawyer who appeared before him. I can't believe you have the nerve to come to me and make this argument, though he didn't say nerve.
And then there's a bunch of cases that range the gamut of the things that we've talked about that are much more jump balls. And I think the picture of where the Supreme Court is going to come down on this is only going to emerge as we fill in the dots and then start to connect them of what the court is and isn't going to tolerate.
And then on the bottom line question of whether we are going to see the president of the United States outright defying a clear order from the Supreme Court of the United States, it's clear that the administration, as much as it wants to thump its chest and look like it's being tough towards judges, would prefer to avoid that.
that particular showdown, because I don't think the public is going to take well to that particular showdown. And if the public doesn't take well to it, then Congress might not take well to it. But push may come to shove on that. And we've certainly seen arguments from the likes of the president and J.D. Vance and others suggesting that if they really have to, they will defy.
I think that their best kind of case to do that on would be a case that touches on national security or a case that touches on immigration and the president's ability to defend our borders against foreign invaders. And I do have those foreign invaders in air quotes because that's the area in which two things are in the administration's favor. One is legal because the courts have said –
the president is at the apex of his powers when he is involved in deciding issues of national security, and they're very reluctant to go up against him on that. But the second thing is, it's the area in which he probably has the most amount, the greatest amount of public support.
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