'Can't do everything': Trump's 'defiance' of court order is 'grounds for impeachment'
President Donald Trump’s failure to bring back the Maryland man who was mistakenly deported is being called “a more direct affront to the rule of law is hard to imagine,” wrote Thomas P. Schmidt in a column from The Atlantic.
After the Supreme Court ordered the Trump Administration to "facilitate the return of" Kilmar Abrego Garcia, both the administration and the government of El Salvador have yet to return him to the United States.
The professor at Columbia Law School believes this “raises a very basic question about our constitutional order: Can courts force a president to comply with their rulings?"
It’s true, the federal courts have some tools to enforce their rulings. However, “their effectiveness depends on democratic cultural norms—and those norms in turn depend ultimately on the vigilance of the American people.”
Schmidt notes, if a branch of government does not comply with its orders, “The courts could direct the U.S. Marshals Service to carry out their orders. The marshals have a statutory duty to do so. But the U.S. Marshals Service is part of the Department of Justice, which is under the supervision of Attorney General Pam Bondi.”
He added, “Bondi, who is a named defendant in many cases against the administration, could instruct the marshals not to enforce an order against her or others in the administration.” Which would render the courts unable to direct U.S. Marshals to do anything.
Schmidt points to three lessons which could help the courts stop the “affront.”
The first is, “In a constitutional democracy, public opinion is the bedrock on which rests the norm of official compliance with federal court judgments. Recent polling suggests that this norm is still robust and bipartisan, though with some alarming cracks.”
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The author does not believe that the public opinion is a one-way street: “The courts can influence and inform public opinion not only through their orders but also through hearings and discovery that make plain the government’s misconduct.”
His second less is that the courts need to be clearer in their directives. “The Trump administration has shown that it is willing to twist any arguable ambiguity in a court order to its advantage.”
Finally, he says, “The political branches matter too. Open defiance of an order from the Supreme Court would be grounds for impeachment. Any indication from Republicans in Congress that such defiance will not be tolerated—communicated publicly or through back channels to the administration—would help ensure that it does not happen.”
“In the end,” Schmidt writes, “courts can do a lot to protect our constitutional values and liberties, but they can’t do everything."