Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration’s recent decision to backtrack on releasing new details about the investigation into the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has prompted something exceedingly rare: Republican voters have begun to break with the president. Mr. Trump has long engendered unwavering loyalty from his followers, who tend to shrug off even his most extreme controversies. But recent public polling suggests even such fervent support may have a limit. While 40 percent of Republicans approve of…

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The New York Times reports: President Trump’s executive orders seeking to punish big law firms have led some of them to acquiesce to him and left others reluctant to take on pro bono cases that could put them at odds with the administration. But as opponents of the White House’s policies organized to fight Mr. Trump in court on a vast range of actions and policies, they quickly found that they did not need to rely on Big Law. Instead,…

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Peter M. Shane writes: No one on the Supreme Court has gone further to enable Donald Trump’s extreme exercise of presidential power than the chief justice of the United States, John Roberts. Associate justices have also written some important opinions shaping executive power, and the Court has issued ever more important unsigned orders, but the most transformative opinions—the opinions that directly legitimize Trump’s unprecedented uses of power—are Roberts’s handiwork. This is not happenstance. Under Supreme Court practice, the most senior…

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The Washington Post reports: President Donald Trump and his appointees have been accused of flouting courts in a third of the more than 160 lawsuits against the administration in which a judge has issued a substantive ruling, a Washington Post analysis has found, suggesting widespread noncompliance with America’s legal system. Plaintiffs say Justice Department lawyers and the agencies they represent are snubbing rulings, providing false information, failing to turn over evidence, quietly working around court orders and inventing pretexts to…

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Cristian Farias writes: In April, U.S. District Judge William Young, who sits in Boston, made a procedural ruling from the bench that seemed to catch the lawyers in the courtroom by surprise. Like many other judges these days, Young had convened a hearing to consider whether to grant a preliminary injunction—which, in the normal course, would put a quick stop to an illegal or otherwise unconstitutional government policy. By one count, in the first seventy days of Donald Trump’s presidency,…

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