Adam in the NYT:
Over the weekend, the Trump administration ignored a federal judge’s order not to deport a group of Venezuelan men, violating an instruction that could not have been plainer or more direct.
Justice Department lawyers later justified the administration’s actions with contentions that many legal experts said bordered on frivolous.
The line between arguments in support of a claimed right to disobey court orders and outright defiance has become gossamer thin, they said, again raising the question of whether the latest clash between President Trump and the judiciary amounts to a constitutional crisis.
Legal scholars say that is no longer the right inquiry. Mr. Trump is already undercutting the separation of powers at the heart of the constitutional system, they say, and the right question now is how it will transform the nation.
“If anyone is being detained or removed based on the administration’s assertion that it can do so without judicial review or due process,” said Jamal Greene, a law professor at Columbia, “the president is asserting dictatorial power and ‘constitutional crisis’ doesn’t capture the gravity of the situation.”
Mr. Trump raised the stakes on Tuesday by calling for the impeachment of the judge who issued the order, James E. Boasberg of the Federal District Court in Washington, describing him on social media as a “Radical Left Lunatic.”
The president did so even as the issues at hand have just started to be tested in a case that seems headed to the Supreme Court.
A few hours later, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. issued an unusual statement, seemingly prompted by such exhortations, and perhaps by the filing of articles of impeachment against Judge Boasberg by a Republican member of the House.
“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” the chief justice said. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”…
Aziz Huq, a law professor at the University of Chicago, said that assessing whether a given development is a constitutional crisis is “generally unhelpful.”
“I think it’s more useful to say that this is moving us into a completely different kind of constitutional order, one that’s no longer characterized by laws that bind officials and that can be enforced,” Professor Huq said. “The law, in other words, becomes a tool to harm enemies, but not to bind those who govern. That is a quite different constitutional order from the one that we’ve had for a long time.”…
Pamela S. Karlan, a law professor at Stanford, said the development was emblematic of how the Trump administration had acted in its first months in office.
“The problem with this administration is not just acute episodes, like what’s happening with Judge Boasberg and the Venezuelan deportation,” Professor Karlan said. “It’s a chronic disrespect for constitutional norms and for the other branches of government.”
Asked whether the nation had reached a tipping point plunging it into a constitutional crisis, Professor Karlan questioned the premise. “‘Tipping point’ suggests a world in which things are fine until suddenly they’re not,” she said. “But we’re past the first point already.”