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March 21, 2025 18:48-19:41 - CSPAN
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Joining us this morning is Stephen Vladeck.
He's a professor of law at Georgetown University's Law Center here to talk about the court challenges facing this Trump administration and the administration's view of the courts.
Mr. Vladek, let's just begin with the number of challenges in the courts to the president's executive orders actions.
Talk about how many there are and why has this gone to the courts.
Yeah, good morning, Greta.
I think that it's a striking number.
I mean, here we are just over two months into the second Trump administration.
And by my count, we're now over about 130 different lawsuits challenging actions that the federal government has taken specifically since January 20th.
You know, math is, I know, a challenge, but that's more than two a day.
And, you know, it's not just the lawsuits, Greta, it is how broadly these lawsuits are pitching, that they're about, you know, almost every agency and almost every type of policy, that they're being filed in, you know, a geographically diverse set of federal courts.
And Greta, perhaps most importantly, that a bunch of them, at least so far, have produced relief, even temporary relief, in the form of temporary restraining orders or preliminary injunctions.
So it really is, I think, a sharper conflict between a new president and the federal courts than one we've seen really in American history because of the volume of cases, because of the significance of some of these cases, and because of the degree of judicial pushback, at least to this point.
What types of judges are issuing these injunctions?
I mean, so every type of judge.
I mean, so, you know, we're seeing injunctions from Democratic-appointed district court judges.
We're seeing injunctions from Republican-appointed district court judges.
You know, a lot of these lawsuits have been brought in, I think, slightly more favorable-seeming parts of the country.
So, we're seeing a lot of lawsuits, for example, in Boston and in Baltimore and on the West Coast in Seattle.
But actually, Greta, the court that has had the most number of cases has been the federal district court here in Washington, D.C.
And so, you know, when you hear folks like President Trump or Stephen Miller or the White House Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt complaining about efforts by Democrats to judge shop, I mean, the reality is that most of the lawsuits are being brought where the federal government is and where you're getting random assignment across the entire federal court bench here in Washington or across the state lines in Maryland or even up in Boston.
So it really has been not just one judge or two judges or three judges, but 25 or 30 judges.
And as much as the president has taken to calling these rogue judges, I do think there comes a point where if there are this many judges from this many different backgrounds appointed by this many different presidents ruling against your policies, maybe the rogue actor is not the courts.
Why is that then?
What does it come down to in your opinion?
Is the executive power limited?
I mean, so first, yes, there's just no argument that the president has unlimited power under the Constitution.
That's not how the Constitution works.
I think part of why we are seeing such a diverse array of court rulings blocking the Trump administration is because, you know, to be perfectly candid, the Trump administration is pushing a whole lot of legal envelopes and is, in a number of cases, crossing what even the administration would concede are well-settled legal lines.
Take birthright citizenship, for example.
You know, the arguments in favor of the Trump administration's executive order mostly turn on disregarding or overruling an 1898 Supreme Court precedent.
The president's power to fire, you know, members of the Merit Systems Protection Board or the National Labor Relations Board turn on overruling a 1935 Supreme Court precedent.
So, you know, Greta, when we look at what the job of a lower federal court judge is, not the Supreme Court, you know, their job is to faithfully apply precedent to whatever case is brought to them.
And so when you have a president who's acting in a way that is unprecedented, when you have actions that are defying settled precedents, when you have a number of other actions that aren't even authorized by the relevant statutes, I think that's why we're seeing such a confluence, such a sort of a high number of these kinds of rulings adverse to the Trump administration.
Let's listen to the president.
In an interview with Fox News, he talked about his views on the judiciary.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼
Going forward, I had judges.
Would you defy a court order?
We all know that.
I never did defy a court order.
unidentified
And you wouldn't in the future?
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼
No, you can't do that.
However, we have bad judges.
We have very bad judges.
And these are judges that shouldn't be allowed.
I think at a certain point, you have to start looking at what do you do when you have a rogue judge.
The judge that we're talking about, you look at his other rulings, I mean, rulings unrelated, but having to do with me, he's a lunatic.
unidentified
Stephen Vladik?
I mean, I'm not sure how much we're supposed to take what the president says seriously, but I'll take a stab.
So the specific judge he's talking about in that clip, Chief Judge Jeb Boesberg here in the D.C. Federal District Court, is about as highly regarded a federal district judge as there is in the country.
I mean, Chief Justice Roberts has tapped him on multiple occasions to serve in roles that you wouldn't pick a rogue judge for.
You'll note the president didn't offer examples of cases that prove that Chief Judge Bozberg is a, quote, rogue judge, unquote.
In fact, Greta, the one other case Bozberg has had involving President Trump, he actually ruled for then President Trump back in 2018 or 2019 when it was an effort to get his tax returns disclosed.
So, you know, I really think that we have to be very specific about the facts here and not just the rhetoric.
And the facts are that the administration is losing in cases before literally dozens of different federal district judges, not all of whom are Obama appointees, not all of whom are Biden appointees.
And, you know, if you really think that a district court is getting something wrong, and Greta, it's entirely possible they are.
Our legal system has remedies for that.
The remedies are to appeal.
The remedies are to seek relief from a higher court.
So in the case of Chief Judge Boesberg, that would be the federal appeals court here in D.C., the D.C. Circuit, and if necessary, from the U.S. Supreme Court.
And, you know, don't just take my word for it.
That's exactly what Chief Justice John Roberts said in his, I think, fairly remarkable statement to the press on Tuesday.
Yeah, let's read that.
Chief Justice John Roberts issuing this statement.
For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.
The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.
You called this remarkable.
Why?
Well, I mean, first, you know, this is in the Chief Justice, we have someone who, you know, doesn't get out of bed in the morning without a plan.
And so this was not exactly spur of the moment.
I think this is only the second time in his almost 20 years now as Chief Justice in which he's made this kind of public statement.
The first was during the first Trump administration, also in response to President Trump.
And Greta, I think it's important because it's a message from the Chief Justice that in his view, the rhetoric has gotten out of hand.
And the rhetoric is coming in this case almost exclusively from the White House and its supporters.
And so John Roberts, I think, is not suggesting he agrees with all of these district court rulings.
He may well not.
But I think what he's saying is we have a process through which, you know, if you have a district judge who's behaving badly, the remedies exist within the legal system.
And once again, I mean, I just, I can't stress this point enough.
We're talking about a whole lot of district judges who would have to be behaving badly if these charges from the White House are to be believed.
On Judge Bozberg, he stopped the department from deporting some immigrants, illegal immigrants that the administration said were terrorists.
They categorized them as that.
Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, putting out a statement saying that order from the judge disregards well-established authority regarding President Trump's power, and it puts the public and law enforcement at risk.
Respond to Pam Bondi.
I mean, so just to be very clear about what we're talking about, the folks who were put on an airplane or three airplanes on Saturday were already in immigration detention.
They were not posing any threat to the public at the time they were placed on these airplanes.
And we now know, I mean, thanks to reporting in the New York Times yesterday, that for a number of these folks, they were being held without any criminal conviction.
They were being held without any proof that they're members of Teren de Aragua, the gang that is at the heart of all of this.
And so, Greta, I think part of the problem here is that we have due process in this country entirely so that we can be confident that when the government whisks individuals off to other countries, they are who the government says they are.
We have due process for undocumented immigrants.
Absolutely.
If we didn't, you could summarily execute people.
And we don't do that because, Greta, how can you be sure that they're undocumented immigrants?
Just by looking at them, right?
So, you know, even in prior declared wars, when the government used the Alien Enemy Act during the War of 1812, during World War I, during World War II, the folks who we picked up and said, you are alien enemies.
We can hold you and remove you, Greta, they got hearings because they were entitled to challenge whether they were, in fact, who the government said they were.
There are reported judicial decisions from the War of 1812, from World War I, from World War II, where federal courts looked carefully in the middle of a war at the question of whether a particular detainee was a German citizen or an Italian citizen or perhaps a Swiss citizen who could not be detained.
If that was available during World War II, our most complete total war in American history, it's hard to see the case that the Attorney General is trying to make that it shouldn't be available today.
Let's go to Bruce in New York, Independent.
Our first call here.
Welcome to the conversation, Bruce.
Go ahead.
Well, thank you.
Good morning, Stephen.
I'm a political anthropologist, and I have a two-part question.
One, I've been watching concentration of executive powers for decades now, really.
And I'm sure you're aware that it's been issues and escalating as an issue for some time politically.
But I've never seen it become a domestic problem where it's an attack upon institutions within the system itself.
That's number one.
Number two, I appreciate your objectivity, by the way.
What I see is, you know, people keep taking Trump's rhetoric, as you had difficulty doing, as a kind of equivocation, and you can't really be sure whether it's rhetoric or what he means.
And then it goes through, and people are saying, well, you better take him serious after the fact, et cetera.
When are we going to start seeing this as a pattern?
It's not just the judges.
It's not just the Justice Department under Biden.
It's not just the education system.
He uses the same rhetoric all the time.
And we don't basically represent it as a pattern of his attack.
And the question of his attack, of course, is an open question as to why he's doing his political power, whether he's attempting to change the institutions, whether he's trying to basically, there's accusations of trying to destroy democracy itself.
That aside, the fact that he has taken a battering ram to institutions systematically, including the free press, including news on TV, every single institution in the country seems to be subject to his wrath, and he's using the power, the executive powers, to do this, whether or not it's justified, whether or not it's legitimated.
They use rhetoric to move ahead, and then damage being done, they make no apologies, they move on to the next group.
All right, Bruce, let's get a reaction from Mr. Vladik.
So, I mean, Bruce, thanks for the questions.
I mean, I think there are two different things going on here, and it's worth breaking them apart.
The first is that some of the moment we're in did not come out of nowhere.
I mean, I think, right, we have been building for several generations toward sort of a state of government where presidents of both parties come to office, have very little policy support from Congress, even if their party controls both chambers of Congress, and is left to do most of their major domestic policy work through executive orders.
And, you know, Bruce and Greta, what that does is it heightens the conflict points.
It means you're going to have more and more conflict between the president and the courts because the presidents of both parties are claiming power that is less and less directly traceable to statutes that Congress has enacted.
It's a lot of what's happening with Trump.
But we saw this to some degree with the Biden administration.
We saw it with the first Trump administration, et cetera.
So, in some respect, we have been heading for this for some time.
And really, there, I think it's a conversation about how Congress has abdicated so much of its regulatory responsibility and so much of its role in setting nationwide policy.
But, you know, even within that space, where this is in some respects a difference of degree and not kind, there's still something unique about what the current administration is doing.
And I think Bruce is right, Greta, that there's a sort of a hostility to institutions that we didn't see even during the first Trump administration.
I mean, just yesterday, the executive order purporting to try to start dismantling the Department of Education, which you were talking about earlier this morning.
You know, these are sort of larger challenges to settled understandings than we've seen even in prior administrations.
And those challenges are coming in different forms: refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated, mass firings of federal employees without whom these agencies cannot effectively function, and now trying to even shutter entire agencies.
And so, Greta, I think part of what is provoking all of these lawsuits and all of these judicial rulings against the Trump administration is the novelty of what we're seeing.
Not just that it's new, but it's new in ways that are fundamentally inconsistent with how the separation of powers had worked in this country for the better part of 240 years.
And I think that's part of why federal judges from across the ideological spectrum have been reacting the way they have.
Julius Krein, who's the editor of American Affairs, writes in the opinion section of the New York Times: Trump does need to actually legislate.
There are limits to governing by executive order.
And he notes that executive orders can easily be reversed by a future president, and they can only go so far.
Right.
I mean, I think, you know, there's a larger story here about not just Congress's fecklessness when it comes to President Trump, but Congress's broader abandonment over the last 30 or 40 years of the lead role in setting domestic policy.
I mean, it used to be that a president would come to office and would have 100 days to try to get major policies through Congress, to try to get legislation enacted through Congress.
When President Trump signed the sort of the continuing resolution last Friday, I believe, Greta, that was the second bill he has signed since January 20th, the second.
And it wasn't a policy bill.
It was just keeping the money on.
So, you know, I think part of what has created the space for someone like President Trump to come in and try to do all of this stuff through novel assertions of executive power is that Congress has stopped asserting legislative power.
And so, if we're thinking about sort of longer-term solutions that are not just about the current administration and our current political moment, you know, I think we really have to start thinking again about why it's important for Democrats and Republicans alike to be voting for folks to represent us in Congress who actually are interested in the institutional politics of Washington and not just in partisan politics.
And that's, I think, a tricky, a tricky road to hoe.
Let's go to Christian, Phoenix, Arizona, Republican.
Hi, Christian.
Hi.
Good morning.
Thank you so much for taking my call.
So what we have seen is a continuation of the interference from federal district and circuit appeals judges.
And this continuance that we saw from 2017, really even prior to even Trump really getting into office.
So some of these judges were going after Trump from the federal judiciary.
Then, when he became president, they were interfering with Trump, starting with the travel ban, which was overturned, by the way.
These 200-plus lawsuits in all of these different courts, none of these judges were elected president of the United States.
I didn't see their name on a ballot.
They didn't run in a contested primary.
They weren't nearly assassinated on national television.
So, the idea that these judges or any one of these judges are the president or they get to make executive decisions from the federal judiciary if that is a threat to our Republican form of government.
Christian, what, Christian, how do you respond to the judiciary being the third branch of government, co-equal government?
Say that again, I'm sorry.
That the judiciary is the third branch of government, it's there for checks and balances, just like Congress.
The judiciary, their job is not to challenge or try to rule from the bench with temporary restraining orders and running down these TROs in a conveyor belt.
That is not their job.
And it's a shame that Congress allowed something like this.
Okay.
Let's get a response.
Mr. Vladik.
So, first, let's be clear.
That's exactly their job.
I mean, the reason why we have independent judges who are not elected is not an accident.
It's because the founders were very wary about the British system where the courts were not independent of the executive.
And the whole point was to have judges who could be sufficiently insulated to stand up to what the founders called tyranny of the majority.
I dare say this is about as powerful a moment of that as we've seen in American history.
And, Granted, just on the facts, you know, Christian mentioned the travel ban.
Let's be clear about what happened with the travel ban during the first Trump administration.
The first iteration of the travel ban, the chaotic Friday night weekend, you know, airport version, that was blocked by the federal courts, and the Trump administration, you know, took it down.
The second iteration of the travel ban that was blocked by the federal courts.
That block was mostly affirmed by the Supreme Court in the summer of 2017.
And the Trump administration went back to the drawing board.
It was only the third iteration of the travel ban after the administration had responded to two rounds of judicial rulings that the Supreme Court upheld five to four.
That's how the system is supposed to work.
And so, when Christian refers to federal judges interfering with the executive branch, I guess I would put it slightly differently.
It's federal judges insisting that the executive branch follow the law.
And if it's not going to be federal judges, I think the question everyone should be asking themselves is: who will it be?
Or is the law just whatever President Trump says it is?
Because if it's that, then we're not living in a democracy.
And I think we have to come to terms with that.
David's in Baltimore, Independent.
Morning, David.
Good morning.
Your guest said that if we can't trust what Trump says, well, I ask, who are we to take seriously?
Dostoevsky wrote this gem of a quote from one of his books.
He says, If there is no God, all things are permitted.
And I would suggest that while politicians and academics and commentators, journalists have been speaking from their ivory towers, the streets have become lawless.
The institutions have become lawless.
Even the church is becoming lawless.
Now, When Moses got the Ten Commandments from God himself, the kings of the earth, apart from Israel, they were writing their own laws, and if they didn't like them, they changed them.
Just look at what happened to Daniel and his people in Babylon.
They didn't like him, so they wrote laws to condemn him.
Show me the person, I'll find the crime.
Now, we have to get serious about whether we want to live or whether we want to die, whether we want this nation to thrive just in a normal, peaceful way, or whether we want to see it crumble as Russia did in 1917.
All right.
Stephen Vladd, do you have any thoughts?
I mean, just I think the first question is the right one.
So who should we trust?
You know, the old Russian proverb is trust but verify.
I think part of why federal judicial proceedings are able to bring clarity and shine light on what the government is doing to a degree that White House press briefings are not is because you have lawyers who are speaking before judges with a duty of candor.
You have, you know, statements that are filed under penalty of perjury, where lying is not just what everybody does, but actually can come with real serious consequences.
You have the possibility of professional misconduct charges for lawyers who misrepresent things to the courts.
So, Greta, you know, I'm not here to say the courts are perfect.
They're not.
I mean, there's lots of stuff we need to do to fix the courts.
But I think it's much more likely that we're going to get an accurate sense of what the federal government is doing when federal officers are testifying under oath, when federal government lawyers are answering questions under penalty of professional misconduct than in any other space in our current discourse.
So it's not that I trust courts implicitly.
It's that I think if folks are looking for facts, you know, I would look at what the government is telling courts as opposed to what the government is telling friendly media outlets.
All right, Broadway, Virginia, Jerry is there, Republican.
Yeah, good morning.
Good morning.
First, let me say that one radical lunatic judge does not have a right to erase 77 million American votes.
And then you talk about process.
You're right.
Those people should have been processed when they entered our country.
ICE knew that these people were criminals, but they ordered illegally against federal law to release them into the country, fly them anywhere they wanted to go with no they knew who they were.
They knew they were criminals.
All right.
Stephen Vladek.
I mean, I guess, you know, two things to say.
First, again, we are not talking about a single, quote, radical lunatic judge.
We're talking about dozens of judges.
Second, with regard to undocumented immigrants, I mean, I guess the question I would ask anyone who takes that position is if ICE were to pick you up off the street tomorrow and haul you off to an immigration detention center in Louisiana because someone in the government says you committed a crime, you entered the country unlawfully, you're not an American, you don't have a visa.
I would think we would all want you or I or anybody else in that position to have a meaningful opportunity to contest what the government's basis is for arresting you, for detaining you, and for potentially removing you from the country.
And, you know, we can debate, Greta, how severe our immigration laws should be.
We can debate whether the Alien Enemy Act even applies to Trende Aragua.
I think it really ought not to be an issue that divides Democrats and Republicans, that every single person is entitled to at least some due process before any of that can happen.
Because even if the government's not acting maliciously, the possibility that the government might make a mistake should be something that's always on our minds.
We're showing a video of these gang members that were deported from the United States.
They were not brought back to their home country of Venezuela.
They were brought back to El Salvador and they were met by soldiers and the El Salvadorian president.
What do you make of that?
Is that illegal?
I mean, so it raises a whole separate host of issues.
Greta, there are circumstances in which the federal government has the authority to remove non-citizens to a country other than their country of origin.
And the Supreme Court in a case in 2005 largely upheld that.
The problem is that there are two different federal laws.
There's the UN Convention Against Torture, and there's a federal statute called the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998 that bar the federal government from removing anyone to circumstances in which those folks credibly fear torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.
And at least based on what we know from the pictures we're seeing out of El Salvador, there's a non-frivolous claim that that's part of what's happening on the far end of this.
So again, I mean, I go back to where we started, which is, even if you think the law should allow the federal government to do this to folks who are members of Trende Aragua, we should all hopefully have common cause that it only allows the federal government to do it to folks who are members of Trende Aragua, and that whether or not you or I or they are members of Trende Aragua should not just be up to the federal government.
The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is the law that the president in this administration has cited.
And it says, whenever there shall be a declared war or any invasion or predatory incursion shall be perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the United States, all subjects of the hostile nation or government could be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies.
When has this law been used?
So, you know, we talked briefly about the three most visible prior invocations of the Act, the War of 1812, when it was used against British nationals living in the United States, World War I, when it was used against predominantly German nationals living in the United States, and World War II, when it was invoked against German, Italian, and a handful of Japanese nationals living in the United States.
And Greta, what's striking is, I mean, you read the sort of the operative provision.
There's also a provision in the statute that provides specifically for judicial review, even during wartime.
I mean, in contexts in which historically there really was not a lot of judicial review.
And so that's why I think it's really important when folks are learning about this 1798 statute to point out that even during World War II, there were literally hundreds of court cases where people we were holding under the auspices of this statute objected on the ground that they weren't who the government said they were or that they weren't nationals of countries with which we were at war.
And Greta, federal courts reviewed those claims.
They often rejected them because oftentimes they were meritless, but not because the federal courts lacked the power to hear those cases, not because these folks didn't have a right to judicial review.
And so I think, you know, part of what is so, I think, disheartening about our current discourse is that there's this sense that like as long as the right labels are used to describe the wrong people, due process doesn't matter.
And it seems to me that we all ought to keep in mind the idea that whether fee people are the right people or the wrong people is a due process question.
And we can believe that the government has remarkably broad authorities to remove people who are in this country unlawfully.
But how do we know that they really are?
And that's why I think so much of the issue surrounding the Alien Enemy Act case, surrounding what's happening with these mass removals to El Salvador, is the absence of due process.
Let's go to Jacksonville, Florida.
Fran, Democratic Color.
Yes, I totally, totally agree with your guests today.
And to think that all these people are calling in, giving the president the authority to do whatever he wants.
Now, this is just too much.
I don't care who the president is.
This is a country of laws.
That's why so many people want to come here.
They think they'll get a fair shake here.
You know, if a person is a criminal, that's determined by the courts, not by the president.
So people who are calling in thinking that this is okay, they want a king.
And then the king can off with anybody's head, including theirs.
And they should keep that in mind.
All right, Fran.
Stephen Vladic.
I mean, I think what Fran says is exactly right.
You know, due process is how we can have faith that the government is actually pursuing to law and not pursuant to fiat.
You know, the only thing I would say is it's Justice Robert Jackson, who was on the Supreme Court from 1941 to 1954, and who also spent time as the lead U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal after World War II.
You know, Greta, he wrote a series of opinions after he came back from Nuremberg in which he tried to sort of contrast what had gone wrong in the legal system in Nazi Germany versus what he thought was right about the legal system in the United States.
And every time he had one of those cases, it always came down to the same basic idea, that you can have harsh substantive laws.
You can have substantive laws that are immensely rights-restricting as long as they are applied fairly, as long as they are applied in a way that's not arbitrary, as long as they're applied in a way that is meaningful, that folks are on notice about.
He put it in one case in a particularly colorful way.
He said, if given the choice, I suspect most of us would prefer to live in a world with Soviet substantive law and American procedural rules than the other way around.
And I think that's, you know, it's a sort of, it's a nerdy insight, but I think it's an important one that, you know, we can have policy disagreements.
We will always have policy disagreements about what the rules ought to be for the federal government's behavior.
But the notion that the rules should be enforced in a way where we have faith that they're being enforced properly, where we have faith that they're being enforced correctly, and where we have faith that they're being enforced against the right people is really what separates the rule of law from something else.
And so I get very nervous when anyone, whether it's a supporter of President Trump or during the Biden administration, a supporter of President Biden, says, you know, we should just defer to the president on this.
That's not the system the founders set up, and they set it up that way on purpose.
All right, let's go to Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
Obi, Independent, good morning to you.
Good morning, or good morning, America.
My thing is, Donald Trump, the person, lied connected, came through, been the courts, lost one, moving forward fast.
Now he's the president.
He's still lying, going to court, doing this, doing that, holding up boggling courts down with all his lies, and he should be held accountable.
First, he should tell the truth, be made to tell the truth, show facts and not all mouths.
That's my point.
Good luck.
Stephen Vladic, when it comes to the deportation of these alleged gang members to El Salvador, at this point, what can the judge do?
I mean, they've left the country.
They're there.
So.
Right.
I mean, so, you know, obviously federal judges don't have authority over El Salvadorian prisons.
And, you know, Chief Judge Bosberg hasn't claimed that authority.
But, you know, Greta, the federal courts do have authority over the federal executive branch.
And so, you know, we've been led to believe by statements from the president of El Salvador that the reason why these folks are being held there is because we're paying for that.
We could stop paying.
Right.
And indeed, there are other immigration cases where individuals have been wrongfully removed from the country, where federal courts have ordered the federal government, Greta, not to bring them back, but to take all possible steps to bring them back.
You know, that might not be sufficient.
And it is possible that the nearly 300 folks who were removed last weekend will have a very hard time having that reversed.
But I still think there's real importance.
And part of why I think Chief Judge Bosberg is still pushing this issue is in trying to prevent that from happening again.
It's one thing if the executive branch takes one action that's unlawful.
It's something else entirely if they're able to do it over and over and over again.
And so I think part of what's happening in that case is not just trying to get to the bottom of the authority for what the government did last weekend, but whether the government has any authority to do that again in future cases to come.
Bill is in Venice.
Florida, Republican, welcome to the conversation.
Thank you, and good morning.
Good morning.
I'd like to comment on the unconstitutional use of executive orders.
Executive orders, they're federal executive orders.
They apply to federal employees, federal land, and the military.
Executive orders do not constitutionally apply to the states.
They're being used to bypass the Constitution and in other unlawful ways.
Would you comment on that, please?
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼
Sure.
unidentified
I mean, I think it's a little tricky because not all executive orders are equal.
Executive orders are not per se problematic.
The typical executive order is either, as you say, directed toward the federal government, the internal workings of the executive branch, or is the president articulating his interpretation of authority he has, whether directly under the Constitution or as delegated to him by Congress in a statute.
And so part of the trick is that whether an executive order is lawful or not really depends on the validity of the interpretation it reflects.
So let's just take birthright citizenship as an example.
The president has the power to interpret immigration law by executive order.
Just about every president since Harry Truman has done that.
The problem with the executive order in this case is that the way that President Trump is interpreting the relevant statutes is unconstitutional, right?
That the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment does not provide for the reading that the president's offering.
And so I guess, Greta, my suggestion would be for folks to try to separate out the sort of the inherent validity question for executive orders, which I think is a bit of a red herring, from the specific claim each executive order is making, which is about a reading of a statute or a reading of the Constitution to give the president the power to do a particular thing.
A bunch of those readings are probably valid, but not all of them.
And that's where we run into the court battles.
Floor Town, Pennsylvania, Tony is an independent.
Hi, good morning.
Excellent conversation.
I agree with many of the principles that this Georgetown professor is putting forward.
I think we do need to get back to rule of law, equal protection, freedom of speech.
I think just basic first principles.
And I'm worried that around the world, democracies are under threat.
We see growing authoritarianism, oligarchy, and these forces are building.
And the undermining of this democracy has been happening for decades.
It's not new with Trump.
I worry that many of the callers think this is new.
There's a few that have pointed out that we've had these issues for some time.
One study I would point out is there's a Princeton study in 2014 that looked at legislative outcomes.
There's no relationship between voter preference and legislative outcomes.
There is a very significant relationship.
Three-quarters of the time, special interest lobbyists get what they want legislatively.
This isn't democracy.
It's not even a constitutional republic anymore.
It's a fascist system controlled by corporations and big money.
You can't have democracy in people like Elon Musk.
If you have billionaires that have $400 billion, democracy in a society like that is not possible, not even a constitutional republic.
So our system has been overthrown.
It's no longer a democracy.
It's no longer a constitutional republic.
All right, Tony, I'm going to jump in so that Stephen Vladic can give us his response.
Well, I mean, I think I share a lot of Tony's concerns, and I think I also agree that this has been going on for a lot longer than the last two months.
I guess I'll just say, to me, I don't want to sort of get out over my skis.
I think part of what is missing from our current discourse is the notion that institutions matter for their own sake.
That we've gotten to a point where the separation of parties has really become the dominant question in American politics as opposed to the separation of powers.
And it's those conditions, it's those circumstances that make it possible for what we've seen over the last two months, that make it possible for someone like Elon Musk to wield the stunning amount of power he's been given without meaningful pushback from Congress.
And so I guess, you know, there are broader currents that are, you know, not limited to the United States that I think are going to be hard to resist.
But one of the ways in which I think we can all insulate ourselves better against those pressures is really to go back to basics when it comes to the separation of powers.
You know, James Madison wrote in Federalist 51 that the way we are going to preserve liberty in this country is through ambition, is that ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
We want an ambitious executive.
We want an ambitious judiciary, but we also want an ambitious Congress.
And the idea is that the branches will push up against each other, and that's how we will be the safest.
And Greta, I think part of what we're seeing today is the culmination of decades of one of the branches, Congress, no longer being ambitious in the institutional sense.
And so, you know, when we think about how we build back from this, how we recover from this, it's not just about who we're electing to lead the country from the White House.
It's about who we're electing to represent us on Capitol Hill.
And I think the more that we can, you know, push for people to run based on commitments to Congress's institutional power and not just to short-term partisan political wins, the more we'll be in a position to defend against the pressures that the caller raises.
Deborah's in Pennsylvania, Democratic caller.
Morning, Deborah.
Good morning, C-SPAN.
I just think this is one of the best conversations I've heard in a long, long time.
This professor is spot on with everything he's saying.
Please, if you called in defending the executive branch, heed his warning.
He is so spot on.
We have three co-equal branches of government.
And defying the judges' orders in this deportation of migrants was definitely an overreach by the executives to the judicial branch.
The whole reason we must heed the rule of law is because there could be human error.
A doctor was among the deported, and the tattoo was misread as a gang image.
I fear we're losing one of the hallmarks of our great nation, home of the free.
All right.
Stephen Vladdick, pick up there.
I mean, I don't know what to add other than to say, you know, I would hope that even in these toxic political times when we are all so inclined to disagree with each other and to distrust each other's motives, that the one thing maybe we can all agree upon is that folks are entitled to notice and an opportunity to be heard before bad things happen to them.
Not because they've earned it through their conduct, but because we need that confidence that the government is acting in a way that is responsible.
We need the confidence that when the government arrests someone and whisks them off to El Salvador, they're arresting someone who they had a right to arrest and not a political opponent and not a mistake and not a family member.
And that's the mentality that I think has been missing from so many of our current conversations because we've become so fixated on whether our side is winning.
Our side, to me, isn't Democrats or Republicans.
Our side is the rule of law.
And the rule of law right now, I think, is losing to a degree that we haven't seen in a very long time.
And that should scare even folks who like the bottom lines of what that's accomplishing.
Stephen Vladek, Georgetown University Law Professor, thank you for the conversation.
Thank you, Greta.
Good morning, everyone.
First hour of today's Washington Journal focusing on dismantling the Education Department.
Do you agree with President Trump's move yesterday or disagree?
Dial in now.
Let's hear a little bit more from the President yesterday at the White House.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼
The department's useful functions and such as, and they're in charge of them, Pell Grants, Title I funding, resources for children with disabilities and special needs will be preserved, fully preserved.
They're all going to be.
So if you look at the Pell Grants, supposed to be a very good program, Title I funding and resources for children with special disabilities and special needs, they're going to be preserved in full and redistributed to various other agencies and departments that will take very good care of them.
And that's very important to Linda, I know, and it's very important to all of us.
But beyond these core necessities, my administration will take all lawful steps to shut down the department.
We're going to shut it down and shut it down as quickly as possible.
It's doing us no good.
We want to return our students to the states where just some of the governors here are so happy about this.
They want education to come back to them, to come back to the states, and they're going to do a phenomenal job.
You know, if you look, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, I have to tell you, I give them a lot of credit.
China's top 10.
And so we can't now say that bigness is making it impossible to educate because China is very big.
But you have countries that do a very good job in education.
And I really believe, like some of the governors here today, from states that run very, very well, including a big state like Texas, but states that run very well are going to have education that will be as good as Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and those top Finland, those top countries that do so well with education.
unidentified
I think they'll do every bit as well.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼
And what do you think about that, Governor?
Do you agree?
I think so.
Ron, do you agree?
I think so.
unidentified
Florida.
Iowa.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼
That's right.
I really believe that they'll be as good as any of them.
unidentified
President Trump vowing to take all legal steps to shut down the Education Department.
Recent polls taken on this move by the President show that 60% oppose eliminating the Department of Education, while 33% support it.
This is according to a Quinnipiak poll.
Take a look at another poll.
When they were asked about eliminating the Department of Education by party, 98% of Democrats oppose it, 64% of independents and 18% of Republicans.
67 of Republicans support the idea of dismantling the Education Department.
1% of Democrats support it, while 31% of independents.
Those poll numbers from Quinnipiak, a recent poll done by that outfit.
Take a look at congressional reaction.
This is from the Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer in a tweet saying, attempting to dismantle the Department of Education is one of the most destructive and devastating steps Donald Trump has ever taken.
This will hurt kids.
The horrible decision by Donald Trump will be felt by teachers, parents, school leaders, and in the quality, he said, of education our children receive.
Then you have this from Michael Bennett, Democratic Senator from Colorado.
Parents are worried enough about the state of America's public education system.
Reading scores have hit a 20-year low, and chronic absenteeism is on the rise.
All of this is proof we need to work together to reimagine our public schools for the 21st century.
Now take a look at Republicans' response.
Bill Cassidy, who is the chair of the Senate committee that oversees the Education Department.
I agree with President Trump that the Department of Education has failed its mission.
Since the department can only be shut down with congressional approval, I will support the president's goals by submitting legislation to accomplish this as soon as possible.
And then you have this from Thomas Massey, who has opposed the president and Republicans in recent weeks.
Bravo, Congress should support President Trump's bold agenda by passing his bill, H.R. 899, to abolish the Department of Education.
We could also use rescissions in the budget reconciliation process, which only requires 51 votes in the Senate, to back him up.
If you support this idea of getting rid of the federal education department, do you think Republicans should do this through reconciliation and with a simple majority?
Let's get to calls.
Helen in Long Beach, California, Republican.
Good morning to you, Helen.
Go ahead.
Yes, hi.
I'm a Republican, and I've been a special needs teacher for four decades and still am teaching.
My comment, good.
Time to go.
It's been a waste of resources.
It's been a waste of money.
It's been ridiculous mandates that we all have to pay lip service to.
Complete waste of money and time and precious resources.
So Helen, when you say mandates, ridiculous mandates, explain for those who are not familiar with the education system some of those mandates.
We have curriculum mandates for special needs students that came out, I think, maybe about with the Obama administration.
And it was requiring a uniform curriculum for all students with disabilities, moderate to severe.
And we got stuck with some ridiculous curriculum.
And because they're older students, some of my students are high school students, but they're still developmentally delayed.
And, you know, I'm going to put it bluntly.
They're developmentally about three or four years old.
We're mandating, teach chemistry.
You've got to teach geometry.
You've got to teach physics.
And so we get these little crappy packets that come from a company that has been contracted with by the district.
And they tell us, well, you need to modify it.
You need to be creative.
In so many words, fix it.
All right.
So Helen.
As you know, the curriculum comes from the local level.
But when it comes to special education, you're saying this came from the federal government.
This came from the federal government.
They're all supposed to have equal access to all academic materials.
Well, you know, it translated into fix it, make it look like geometry, make it look like chemistry, do what you got to do.
And then as a dedicated teacher, you rent out and you spend your own money on the weekend trying to find materials that you can modify, fix to show that you're doing this.
So that's one thing about getting rid of the Department of Education.
Secondly, I've also served briefly as a Title I coordinator.
Get this.
My students aren't even verbal, but we had Title I funding coming in.
So we had to go to the meetings.
Nothing but layer upon layer upon layer of bureaucracy, paperwork, paperwork, meetings to be in compliance, how to fill out the paperwork properly, how to get the funding, how to word it correctly.
This has been just a bunch of bureaucratic nightmare.
All right, Helen, I'm going to jump in so that I can put a little bit more meat on the bones of what you're saying.
This is from USA Today.
Title I, student loans and other programs will continue under this executive order.
Public schools rely on the Education Department to distribute federal education dollars.
A major stream comes from Title I, a program that boosts funding to schools serving high poverty populations.
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