Slate - On Monday, Donald Trump’s Department of Justice made two arguments in two different courts that, taken together, amount to a legal claim of near-dictatorial power by Trump. First, it informed a federal appeals court that the president has authority to declare any noncitizens to be “alien enemies” and to deport them to foreign prison, where they will be forced to perform hard labor indefinitely—without notice, a hearing, or any meaningful opportunity to prove their innocence. Second, it refused to provide U.S. District Judge James Boasberg with details of these mass deportation operations, even in a closed courtroom, even under seal, insisting that Boasberg’s authority must yield to the “mandate of the electorate.” In other words, Trump’s electoral victory grants him an absolute right to conduct these deportations, rendering them unreviewable by the judiciary.
This is not a constitutional argument, and it barely pretends to be. It is more akin to an argument from an archaic notion of the divine rights of kings: Trump is our ruler, it holds, such that anything he does is intrinsically lawful. In a constitutional democracy, of course, the president is not a sovereign whose authority is above question or limitation. Even the most extreme versions of presidential powers have limits of some kind. But this administration is relentlessly pushing a theory of executive power to dangerous new extremes, smearing lower courts that stand in its way.
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