Latest news with #executivePower
New York Times
8 hours ago
- Politics
- New York Times
Who's the Mad King Now?
Maybe the mad king, the other one, wasn't so mad after all. 'George III is Abraham Lincoln compared to Trump,' said Rick Atkinson, who is vivifying the Revolutionary War in his mesmerizing histories 'The British Are Coming' and 'The Fate of the Day.' The latter, the second book in a planned trilogy, has been on the New York Times best-seller list for six weeks and is being devoured by lawmakers on Capitol Hill. As the 'No Kings' resistance among Democrats bristles, and as President Trump continues to defy limits on executive power, it is instructive to examine comparisons of President Trump to George III. 'George isn't the 'royal brute' that Thomas Paine calls him in 'Common Sense,'' Atkinson told me. 'He's not the 'tyrant' that Jefferson calls him in the Declaration of Independence, and he's not the sinister idiot who runs across the stage in 'Hamilton' every night singing 'You'll Be Back.'' ('And when push comes to shove, I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love!') Yes, George III had manic episodes that scared people — depicted in Alan Bennett's 'The Madness of George III,' a play made into a movie with Nigel Hawthorne and Helen Mirren. Palace aides are unnerved when the king's urine turns blue. 'He was in a straitjacket for a while, that's how deranged he was,' Atkinson said. 'His last 10 years were spent at Windsor, basically in a cell. He went blind and deaf. He had long white hair, white beard.' King George was relentless about his runaway child, America. 'He's ruthless,' Atkinson explained, 'because he believes that if the American colonies are permitted to slip away, it will encourage insurrections in Ireland, in Canada, the British Sugar Islands, the West Indies, in India, and it'll be the beginning of the end of the first British Empire, which has just been created. And it's not going to happen on his watch.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Bloomberg
3 days ago
- Politics
- Bloomberg
Supreme Court Set to Leave Town With Trump Challenges Unsettled
The US Supreme Court will close out its term in the next two weeks with a trail of unfinished business, leaving in limbo the fate of many of President Donald Trump's most sweeping uses of executive power. The justices will convene Wednesday and Friday to issue some of the 21 remaining decisions that are due in argued cases. The pending disputes include Trump's bid to upend the longstanding constitutional principle that babies born on US soil in virtually all cases automatically get American citizenship.
Wall Street Journal
4 days ago
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
Protests, the Courts and the National Guard
President Trump's decision to deploy the National Guard in Los Angeles has opened the latest chapter in the long-running debate over the constitutional limits to executive power. Since George Washington's administration, politicians and courts have wrestled with the same problem the Framers faced: creating a presidential office with enough power to administer the executive branch, enforce the law and lead the nation in war and peril—without giving the president so much power as to endanger the constitutional order and the people's liberties.
Yahoo
14-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
King Trump? 'I don't feel like a king' says the president
President Donald Trump said he doesn't feel like royalty when asked for his response on the 'No Kings' rallies planned across the country in protest of his expansive use of executive power. About 2,000 protests against the two-term Republican are expected to coincide with a military parade being held in Washington D.C on June 14 on the U.S. Army's 250th anniversary and Trump's 79th birthday. Protest organizers say Trump is 'hijacking' the Army's anniversary to 'feed his ego' and celebrate himself. 'I don't feel like a king. I have to go through hell to get stuff approved,' Trump said in response to a reporter's question in the White House right after he signed three resolutions overturning California's mandate to ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles and speed up the adoption of electric vehicles by 2035. 'The king would have never had the California mandate. He wouldn't have to call up Mike Johnson and say, 'fellas, you have got to pull this off,'' Trump said, referring to House Speaker Mike Johnson. 'And after years, we get it done. No, no, we're not a king.' Indivisible, a progressive group, alongside a coalition of partner organizations, said it's holding the events to 'reject authoritarianism and show the world what democracy actually looks like: people, united, refusing to be ruled.' The parade along the National Mall is set to feature thousands of police officers and security measures including metal detectors, anti-scale fencing, concrete barriers and drones overhead surveilling the crowd. It also comes as Trump and California Gov. Gavin Newsom are locked in a standoff over the use of the National Guard and the U.S. military to help quell protests that have sprung up in Los Angeles against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement sweeps carried out at the president's direction. There will be no planned "No Kings" protests for Washington D.C. Organizers said they intentionally avoided having a protest in the capital to avoid being cast as 'anti-veteran.' The largest protest is instead scheduled for noon ET in Philadelphia, where the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'I don't feel like a king' says Trump
Reuters
13-06-2025
- Politics
- Reuters
Trump finds victories at the Supreme Court in rush of emergency cases
June 13 (Reuters) - Since President Donald Trump returned to office in January, his administration has bombarded the U.S. Supreme Court with emergency requests seeking immediate intervention to free up his initiatives stymied by lower courts. The strategy is paying off. Once a rarely used pathway to the nation's top judicial body, its emergency docket now bulges with an unprecedented volume of requests for rapid attention by the justices in clashes over Trump's far-reaching executive actions. As the Republican president tests the limits of executive power under the U.S. Constitution, Trump's administration has made 19 emergency applications to the court in less than five months, with one other such application filed by lawyers for migrants held in Texas who were on the verge of deportation. The court already has acted in 13 of these cases. It has ruled in Trump's favor nine times, partially in his favor once, against him twice and postponed action in one case that ultimately was declared moot. Trump's wins have given him the green light to implement contentious policies while litigation challenging their legality continues in lower courts. The court, for instance, let Trump revoke the temporary legal status granted for humanitarian reasons to hundreds of thousands of migrants, implement his ban on transgender people in the U.S. military and take actions to downsize the federal workforce, among other policies. The court's 6-3 conservative majority includes three justice who Trump appointed during his 2017-2021 first presidential term. Six more emergency requests by the administration remain pending at the court and one other emergency request was withdrawn. Among the requests still to be acted upon are Trump's bid to broadly enforce his order to restrict birthright citizenship, to deport migrants to countries other than their own including politically unstable South Sudan and to proceed with mass federal layoffs called "reductions in force." Emergency applications to the court involving Trump policies have averaged about one per week since he began his second term. His administration's applications this year match the total brought during Trump's Democratic predecessor Joe Biden's four years as president. "The Trump administration uses every legal basis at its disposal to implement the agenda the American people voted for," White House spokesperson Harrison Fields told Reuters. "The Supreme Court will continue to have to step in to correct erroneous legal rulings that district court judges enter solely to block the president's policies." The administration has "not sought Supreme Court review in all the cases it could, and part of the story may be that the government is appealing what it thinks are strong cases for it," said Sarah Konsky, director of the University of Chicago Law School's Supreme Court and Appellate Clinic. Georgetown University law professor Stephen Vladeck, who wrote a book about the court's emergency docket, said in a blog post on Thursday that the results favoring Trump should not be attributed only to the court's ideological makeup. At a time when Trump and his allies have verbally attacked judges who have impeded aspects of his sweeping agenda, there is a "very real possibility that at least some of the justices ... are worried about how much capital they have to expend in confrontations with President Trump," Vladeck wrote. The onslaught of emergency applications has diverted the attention of the justices as they near the end of the court's current term. June is usually their busiest month as they rush to finish writing opinions in major cases. For instance, they have yet to decide the fate of Tennessee's Republican-backed ban on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors. Among the emergency-docket cases, the court most recently on June 6 allowed Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, a key player in his drive to slash the federal workforce, broad access to personal data on millions of Americans in Social Security Administration systems and blocked a watchdog group from receiving records on DOGE operations. The court also has allowed Trump to cut millions of dollars in teacher training grants and to fire thousands of probationary federal employees. On the other side of the ledger, the court has expressed reservations about whether the administration is treating migrants fairly, as required under the Constitution's guarantee of due process. On May 16, it said procedures used by the administration to deport migrants from a Texas detention center under Trump's invocation of a 1798 law historically used only in wartime failed basic constitutional requirements. The justices also declined to let the administration withhold payment to foreign aid organizations for work already performed for the government. Trump turned to the emergency docket during his first term as well. His prior administration filed 41 such applications to the court. During the 16 years prior, the presidential administrations of Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama filed just eight combined, according to Vladeck. The court has quickly decided weighty matters using the emergency docket in a way often at odds with its traditional practice of considering full case records from lower courts, receiving at least two rounds of written briefings and then holding oral arguments before rendering a detailed written ruling. It is sometimes called the "shadow docket" because cases often are acted upon without the usual level of transparency or consideration. Some recent decisions on the emergency docket have come with brief opinions explaining the court's reasoning. But typically they are issued as bare and unsigned orders offering no rationale. Konsky noted that the justices sometimes designate emergency cases for regular review with arguments and full briefing. "But in any event, the emergency docket raises complicated questions that are likely to continue to play out in the coming years," Konsky said. Among Trump's emergency applications this year, oral arguments were held only in the birthright citizenship dispute. The liberal justices, often findings themselves on the losing side, have expressed dismay. Once again "this court dons its emergency-responder gear, rushes to the scene and uses its equitable power to fan the flames rather than extinguish them," Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a dissent in the Social Security data case. "The risk of error increases when this court decides cases -as here - with barebones briefing, no argument and scarce time for reflection," Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the teacher grants case. Conservative Justice Samuel Alito defended the emergency docket in 2021, saying there is "nothing new or shadowy" about the process and that it has wrongly been portrayed as sinister.
