Courts have threatened to hold the Trump administration in contempt. It’s time to follow through |
Late last month, a Minnesota federal court judge, Patrick Schiltz, issued an opinion detailing hundreds of instances in which the Trump administration has failed to comply with court orders. He threatened to find it in contempt and to impose penalties.
Schiltz and other federal judges have made such threats before, but they have not followed through. It is time they did, lest they turn their courts into paper tigers.
The administration knows what it is doing. It treats judicial decisions the same way it regards elections.
As the president has said many times, he will abide by the results of elections only if they are “fair”. And in his mind, an election can only be fair if his side wins.
The same thing seems to be true for court decisions. The latest example occurred in the wake of the supreme court decision holding his imposition of tariffs to be unconstitutional.
The president reacted by accusing the justices who ruled against him of being “very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution”. But he didn’t stop there. He accused the court of being “swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think”.
He has used such invective many times before. And in December, the attorney general, Pam Bondi, weighed in with similar claims, this time directed against judges in the eastern district of Virginia after they ruled that the administration violated the law in its appointment of US attorney Lindsey Halligan. Bondi accused them of “engaging in an unconscionable campaign of bias and hostility” and called them “rogue judges who fail to live up to their obligations of impartiality because of their own political views”.
I could multiply the examples, but Trump and his colleagues have made clear their contempt for judges who don’t see the constitution and laws the way they do.
That’s why, almost from the start of the president’s........