Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: Since President Trump’s first term, Brad S. Karp, the chairman of the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, championed himself as a bulwark against what he saw as an unlawful and unpredictable presidency. Mr. Karp, who has a long history of fund-raising for Democrats, sought to unite major law firms in “a call to arms” to fight Mr. Trump in court on issues like his administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their…

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Stephen I. Vladeck writes: For all of the judicial interventions we’ve seen in the first eight weeks of the new Trump administration, alarmingly little has changed on the ground. Much of the unlawfully frozen federal money is still frozen; many of the unlawfully fired federal workers are still out of work. Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia graduate and green card holder arrested March 8 in New York on exceptionally tenuous legal grounds, remains in an immigration detention facility in Louisiana. The…

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CNN reports: President Donald Trump on Friday downplayed his involvement in invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport Venezuelan migrants, saying for the first time that he hadn’t signed the proclamation, even as he stood by his administration’s move. “I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it,” Trump told reporters before leaving the White House on Friday evening. The president made his comments when asked to respond to Judge James Boasberg’s concerns in court…

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Nick Miroff and Jonathan Lemire writes: During the first Trump administration, when Stephen Miller’s immigration policy proposals hit obstacles in federal court, rumors would circulate about his plans to dust off arcane presidential powers. Government lawyers were wary of overreach; officials in the West Wing and at the Department of Homeland Security would sometimes snicker. LOL Stephen, they’d say, amused by his creative zealotry. No one is laughing now. Miller, Donald Trump’s Homeland Security adviser and deputy chief of staff,…

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The New York Times reports: President Trump’s intensifying conflict with the federal courts is unusually aggressive compared with similar disputes in other countries, according to scholars. Unlike leaders who subverted or restructured the courts, Mr. Trump is acting as if judges were already too weak to constrain his power. “Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and coauthor of “How Democracies Die” and “Competitive Authoritarianism.” “We look at these comparative cases…

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The Washington Post reports: Acting Social Security commissioner Leland Dudek said Friday that he is consulting with agency lawyers and the Justice Department as he threatens to shut down the agency in response to a court ruling blocking Elon Musk’s team from accessing sensitive taxpayer data. Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland issued a two-week temporary restraining order Thursday that prohibits Social Security officials from sharing personally identifiable information with Musk’s U.S….

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