The unraveling of the rule of law under Trump is picking up speed
After the “Saturday Night Massacre” in 1973, Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor who had just been fired by President Richard M. Nixon, wondered “whether ours shall continue to be a government of laws and not of men." That question is now more urgent and unresolved than ever as President Trump mounts a destabilizing, dangerous assault on the checks and balances of our constitutional system.
A series of judicial decisions in the past week reminds us that the rule of law still exists in the United States — that we do not, as yet, live in Turkey, Hungary or Russia, former democracies ruled by three of Trump’s favorite autocrats. The Supreme Court ruled against the administration by protecting gay and transgender employees from workplace discrimination and by protecting “dreamers" — young people brought to the United States without documentation — from deportation for the time being. A few days later, a federal judge in Washington ruled against Trump’s attempts to block the publication of former national security adviser John Bolton’s scathing memoir.
These are significant but tenuous victories. Note that the dreamers case was a 5-to-4 decision and that the court did not stop Trump outright from deporting some 700,000 Americans; it merely demanded that he provide a more compelling rationale to do so. If 87-year-old Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg steps down while Trump is in office, her replacement will most likely vote with the most conservative members of the present court to give the president carte blanche to act as arbitrarily as he likes. (The most conservative justices occasionally show some ideological independence — Neil M. Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion in the LGBTQ rights case — but they invariably defer to executive authority when it is challenged.)
While still hemmed in by the federal judiciary, Trump is in the midst of purging the executive branch of anyone who refuses to put loyalty to him above loyalty to the country.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/22/unraveling-rule-law-under-trump-is-picking-up-speed/
We have a criminal as the country's chief law enforcement officer.
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