Leah Litman and Daniel Deacon write:

America seems to be waiting for a clear indication that the country is in a constitutional crisis. Perhaps President Donald Trump will say, “I am defying a court order, and good luck trying to do anything about it.” But short of that, America’s constitutional crisis was always going to be a bit subtler—and that subtler crisis is already here. The administration is already flouting court orders. It’s just that, rather than admitting so, executive-branch officials are saying one thing but doing another.

We have spent the past few months surveying the second Trump administration’s practice regarding court orders and reviewed dozens of cases. We observed a clear pattern: The administration uses the language of the law as cover to claim that it is complying with court orders when in fact it is not. We call this “legalistic noncompliance,” a term intended to capture how the administration has deployed an array of specious legal arguments to conceal what is actually pervasive defiance of judicial oversight. It is a powerful strategy, as it obscures the substance of what the administration is doing with the soothing language of the law.

Although the country is not yet six months into the second Trump administration, already many examples of the phenomenon have emerged. [Continue reading…]