The courts can't save us

Stephen I. Vladeck, NY Times - The second Trump administration appears to have learned some lessons from the first. For instance, even when courts eventually strike down the administration’s policies, there are tactics that can keep those policies in effect long enough to do quite a bit of damage. The courts can do only so much when the goal of imposing a policy isn’t to win as much as it is to break things and, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in “The Great Gatsby,” to “let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

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.