Andrew O’Donohue, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Government Department and a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, published an opinion article in Foreign Policy on how other democracies provide a roadmap for courts to prevail over attacks from the executive branch.
“Just two months in, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration is aggressively challenging judicial constraints on its power, risking a showdown—and constitutional crisis—in which the executive branch seeks to make court orders optional.
“This month, the U.S. executive branch blatantly defied a federal judge’s order to temporarily halt the deportation of migrants to El Salvador. The president himself called for the impeachment of the judge who issued the order, along with other judges. In one of the 139 legal cases filed against the Trump administration as of Wednesday, a federal judge described the president’s executive order to overturn birthright citizenship as “blatantly unconstitutional.”
“The Trump administration’s attacks on the judiciary lack recent precedent in the United States, yet they follow a clear and troubling pattern. In democracies around the world, elected leaders are challenging legal constraints on their power: Just look at Brazil, India, Israel, Hungary, Mexico, Poland, and Turkey, to name a few.”
Read the full article: The U.S. Judicial Crisis Is Uniquely Dangerous