Trump consults Bush torture lawyer on how to skirt law and rule by decree
Trump consults Bush torture lawyer on how to skirt law and rule by decree
John Yoo wrote memo used to justify waterboarding
Trump keen to use executive orders and circumvent Congress
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/20/trump-john-yoo-lawyer-torture-waterboarding?
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John Yoo told the Guardian he has been talking to White House officials about his view that a recent supreme court ruling on immigration would allow Trump to issue executive orders on whether to apply existing federal laws.
“If the court really believes what it just did, then it just handed President Trump a great deal of power, too,” Yoo, a professor at Berkeley Law, said.
"The supreme court has said President Obama could [choose not to] enforce immigration laws for about 2 million cases. And why can’t the Trump administration do something similar with immigration – create its own … program, but it could do it in areas beyond that, like healthcare, tax policy, criminal justice, inner city policy. I talked to them a fair amount about cities, because of the disorder."
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“He could declare that he would not enforce federal firearms laws,” Yoo wrote, “and that a new ‘Trump permit’ would free any holder of state and local gun-control restrictions.
“Even if Trump knew that his scheme lacked legal authority, he could get away with it for the length of his presidency,” he said. In a telephone interview, he added: “According to the supreme court, the president can now choose to under-enforce the law in certain areas and it can’t be undone by his successor unless that successor goes through this onerous thing called the Administrative Procedure Act, which usually takes one to two years.”
Constitutional scholars have rejected Yoo’s arguments as ignoring limits on the executive powers of the president imposed by the founders, who were determined to prevent the rise of a tyrant.
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