Brief Trump 2.0 Legal Update

My go-to legal analysts are getting fed up with Boasberg’s shenanigans. Shipwreckedcrew, who has broadly defended Boasberg in the past—on narrowly defined legal grounds, in my understanding—makes the case that Boasberg has crossed a line with his threats of criminal contempt against the Trump regime in a case that the SCOTUS has said he lacked jurisdiction to begin with:

Randy Barnett @RandyEBarnett

Somebody sure wants to create a constitutional crisis.

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Shipwreckedcrew @shipwreckedcrew

Lots coming today from Judge Boasberg's opinion after I have a chance to review it in detail.

One clear issue I see coming;

Yes, there is much SCOTUS case law about litigants being required to comply with Court orders -- even if erroneous -- until they are reversed.

NONE of that case law deals with a contest between two branches of the federal government where the Exec. has been dragged into Court without jurisdiction, the court does not appropriately establish that it has jurisdiction, and the court then issues an unlawful order directing the Executive branch to act in a particular manner.

SCOTUS is going to need to defuse this bomb that Judge Boasberg has started the timer on.

1:42 PM · Apr 16, 2025

Obviously, the smart and proper thing for a judge to do in this situation would be to just let it go. That Boasberg has not done so, well, tells you what Randy Barnett is saying is likely true.

In another case, Jonathan Turley is coming to a similar conclusion about the need for the SCOTUS to take meaningful action—i.e., write orders that legal professionals can understand. The order in question was written by Roberts CJ. I imagine there are some interesting conversations going on among The Brethren, er, Brothers and Sisters. Roberts dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin act is wearing thin even on ordinarily tolerant profs.

BTW

Randy Barnett, who is a bit of a rock star among SCOTUS litigators, is an interesting guy. He is generally identified as a Libertarian, and that seems to be a generally correct characterization. However, he had a broad liberal education and counts the philosopher Henry Veatch as a mentor:

Veatch was a major proponent of intellectualism, an authority on Thomistic philosophy, and one of the leading neo-Aristotelian thinkers of his time. He opposed such modern and contemporary developments as the "transcendental turn" and the "linguistic turn." A staunch advocate of plain speaking and "Hoosier" common sense, in philosophy and elsewhere, he argued on behalf of realist metaphysics and practical ethics.^[2]

Veatch's most widely read book was Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics (1962) which explicitly offered a rationalist counterpoint to William Barrett's well-known study in existential philosophy, Irrational Man (1958).