The Trump administration has been consulting with the former government attorney who wrote the legal justification for the submarine on how the president could try to rule by decree.
John Yoo told The Guardian that he had been speaking to White House officials about his opinion that a recent Supreme Court ruling on immigration would allow Trump to issue executive orders on whether to apply existing federal laws.
“If the court really believes what it just did, then it also gave President Trump great power,” said Yoo, a professor at Berkeley Law.
“The Supreme Court has said that President Obama could [choose not to] Enforce immigration laws for around 2 million cases. And why the Trump administration can’t do something similar with immigration: create its own … program, but it could do it in areas beyond that, such as healthcare, tax policy, criminal justice, downtown policy. from the city. I told them a lot about the cities, due to the disorder ”.
In a Fox News Sunday interview, Trump stated that he would try to use that interpretation to try to impose decrees on healthcare, immigration and “various other plans” over the next month. The Axios news website first reported White House consultations with Yoo.
Constitutional academics and human rights activists have also pointed to the deployment of federal paramilitary forces against protesters in Portland as a sign that Trump is ready to use this broad interpretation of presidential powers as a means to suppress basic constitutional rights. .
“This is how it begins,” Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, wrote on Twitter. “The dictatorial hunger for power is insatiable. If there ever was a time for peaceful civil disobedience, that time is upon us. ”
Yoo became famous for a legal memo that he wrote in August 2002, when he was a deputy assistant attorney general in the justice department’s legal advisory office.
He stated: “Necessity or legitimate defense may justify interrogation methods that could violate” the criminal prohibition of torture.
Yoo’s memoranda were used to justify the submarine and other forms of torture against terrorism suspects in CIA “black sites” around the world.
When asked if he now regretted his notes, Yoo replied: “I’m still not exactly sure to what extent the CIA took its interrogation methods, but I think that if they stayed within the limits of the legal notes, I think they were not violating Americans law. “
In a book titled Defender in Chief, to be published next week, Yoo argues that Trump was fighting to restore the powers of the presidency, in a way that would have been approved by the drafters of the United States Constitution.
“They wanted each branch to have certain constitutional weapons and then they wanted them to fight. So they wanted the president to try to expand his powers, but they also hoped that Congress would continue to fight the president, “he said.
In a June article in National Review, he wrote that a supreme court decision that blocked Trump’s attempt to repeal Barack Obama’s deferred action program for childhood arrivals, known as Dhaka and established by executive order, meant that Trump could do the same to achieve his goal. policy objectives
Dhaka suspended deportations of undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children. As an example of what Trump could accomplish in the same way, Yoo suggested that the president could declare a national right to carry firearms openly, in conflict with many state laws.
“I could declare that I would not enforce federal firearm laws,” Yoo wrote, “and that a new ‘Trump permit’ would release any holder of state and local gun control restrictions.
“Even if Trump knew that his plan lacked legal authority, he could get away with it during the presidency,” he said. In a phone interview, he added: “According to the Supreme Court, the President can now choose to enforce the law in certain areas and his successor cannot undo it unless that successor goes through this onerous thing called Administration Procedure Law, which generally takes one to two years. “
Constitutional scholars have rejected Yoo’s arguments because they ignore the limits of the president’s executive powers imposed by the founders, who were determined to prevent the rise of a tyrant.
The tribe called Yoo’s interpretation of Dhaka’s decision “indefensible.”
He added: “I am afraid this lawless administration will take full advantage of the fact that the judicial wheels are moving slowly and that it will be difficult to keep up with the many ways that Trump, assisted and prompted by Bill Barr as attorney general and Chad Wolf As the Acting Head of Homeland Security can usurp the powers of Congress and reduce fundamental rights in the immigration space in particular, but also in matters of public health and security. “
On the deployment of federal paramilitary units against Portland, Yoo said he did not know enough about the facts to consider whether it was an abuse of the executive branch.
“It has to be really reasonably related to the protection of federal buildings,” he said. “If it’s just about graffiti, that’s not enough. It really depends on what the facts are. “
Alka Pradhan, a defense attorney in the September 11 terrorism cases against prisoners in the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, said: “John Yoo’s alleged reasoning has always been based on ‘What can the President?’ instead of ‘What is the purpose and letter of the law?’
“That is not legal reasoning, it is inherently tyrannical and undemocratic.”
Pradhan and other defense attorneys at the pre-trial hearings at the Guantanamo Bay military court have argued that the use of torture against his clients, made possible by Yoo’s 2002 note, invalidated much of the case against him. .
“The fact that John Yoo is employed and free to comment on legal matters is an example of the culture of impunity in the United States,” he said.
