Any guess when we’re going to hear if the judge finds administration officials in contempt or not?
It seems that, under Federal law, a judge can arrest people:
18 USC Ch. 203: ARREST AND COMMITMENT)-,Historical%20and%20Revision%20Notes,Federal%20Rules%20of%20Criminal%20Procedure.
… and – explicitly – can imprison them pending trial. Great find.
Starting to think more and more about dueling law enforcement. Pam Bondi’s DOJ (minus defectors) vs one or more federal courts’ “posses”.
Hard to pinpoint, but it can’t be all that much longer. I can understand the judiciary, in the immediate term, slow-rolling acute constitutional-crisis-inducing actions, bending over backwards to give the legislative branch (even more of) an opportunity to act.
I think Judge Judy would enjoy this task. She probably isn’t a federal judge, but it seems rules are out the door, so it doesn’t matter.
I was actually trying to find whether there was a Federal citizen’s arrest statute.
As an aside:
That’s something that’s been interesting in following this issue. There’s no one-stop-shop codification of the federal judiciary’s remedies against a ‘hostile’ Department of Justice. But there seem to be a piece here, a law there, some precedent over there … and you stumble upon parts of it separately and those parts don’t individually seem like much. You start piecing the parts together, though, and it starts to look like a useful framework.
If we are going to throw out all the rules, why not go to the head of the pack and get Judge Reinhold, acting’s Highest Honor.
[Judge Reinhold is neither a real judge nor has he received acting’s highest honor.]
Stranger
Yes, U.S. Marshal Service enforces Court orders. In theory, it is independent, but it still falls under the DOJ, which is corrupted. Judges could hold various officials in contempt. Trump could pardon criminal contempt.
All this seems outlandish, but it is clear that the Trump administration is asserting extra-constitutional power. It’s also increasingly likely that they are going to back up these extra-constitutional power grabs with extra-constitutional muscle and intimidation. Once Trump gets the DOJ he wants, and once he gets the top several tiers of military brass he wants, he will go full-on dictator. There won’t be anything that can stop him then until and unless he overplays his hand too early, which is a possibility, but these guys have been planning this transition to autocracy for four years. It’s all they’ve thought about.
Excellent!
The question is not about authority but execution.
Trump is clearly going to reshape the Department of Justice in the way he wants even if he ends up purging most of the US Deputy Attorney staff and senior staff of most of the agencies within, but I think he’s going to find it more difficult to get the kind of control he wants over the Department of Defense, not because the DoD is some hotbed of liberal reactionism or even that they are indoctrinated to “defend the Constitution” (although the senior staff definitely are), but precisely they are not radicals and are heavily devoted to the status quo with only minor deviations.
Mark Milley is the examplar of a post-Vietnam War era general office; a Trump appointee who is a careerist staff officer and rule-follower who was not about to be the first head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to order the military to shoot unarmed civilian protesters or be a political pawn for Trump’s showboating. Trump is going to have to dig pretty deep to find a cadre of senior officers who will devote their loyalty to him personally (especially as they know that they will likely outlive and outlast Trump), and the cadre who he might come up with are not going to be large enough or sufficiently competent to actually command the US military. Trump, who has repeatedly expressed the wish for generals such as Hitler had, because they were a pretty inept and gormless bunch and backed up by senior staff of whom many wanted Der Führer removed, by assassination if necessary.
Stranger
Not only that, but I suspect that if some super-Trumper two-star officer gets jumped way ahead of all the other two, three, and four star officers to be Chief of Staff or something, they’re not going to be very respected by others. Nor would anyone jumped-up to be in charge of a Combatant Command over the other people in the pipeline.
I mean, I realize that once someone gets a star, it’s a different ball game with respect to getting rank and position, but I also suspect that blatant national politics stuff like that might not be in keeping with the organizational culture of the military either.
Hey, don’t underestimate Trump. With so many veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, I’m sure he can dig up a lot of MAGA enthisiasts that have as solid of credentials as his Secretary of Defense. I bet he can find some majors or corporals or whatever that would love to be generals.
The thing is, you don’t need someone “to actually command the US military”, what you need is someone to ride herd on the people doing the actual work.
And I’m sure his buddy Putin would be willing to give him excellent advice on setting up such a system of Political Officers.
Let the military trained officers run the units day-to-day, just so long as they know the PO can remove them at any time, if they’re not doing what Trump wants.
Although not well appreciated by people who have never experienced it, the US military is not some kind of well-oiled machine that can be turned on a dime. It is an enormous Rube Goldberg-esque contraption that does actually require expertise to get it to function at all, much less well. “Some majors or corporals or whatever that would love to be generals” will basically find that system ground to a halt if they purge the competent careerists.
How well is that working out for Putin? His military (army, navy, and air forces) has gotten its ass handed to it repeatedly by a nation with a military 1/5th the composition and with mostly obsolescent equipment.
Stranger
Yeah, but that is after decades of post-Soviet neglect and corruption. I don’t think even Trump can reduce the effectiveness of the US military that much that quickly. You’ll have a long period of “lions led by donkeys” as they slide into their decline.
The Supreme Court said a President is immune from the law.
Not really. Only for official acts. The question is: is knowingly violating a court order an “official act”. Add to that is the separation of powers. Theoretically, impeding another branch of government is not allowed.
They don’t have to purge all the competent careerists. Just the ones who resist Trump. Plenty of competent officers will happily invade Greenland and bomb Canada.
The Soviet Armed Forces weren’t all that, either; for as vaunted a threat as they supposedly presented to Europe, they couldn’t stop political uprisings in Poland or even get control over even local areas in Afghanistan. The post-Soviet Russian military has certainly been subjected to massive corruption but it was always dependent upon recruits overseen by officers often appointed for political favor over competence.
Frankly most of the expertise (much of it quite technical) in day to day operations in the US military rests with 19-24 year olds with leadership provided by the professional core of NCO ranks. If Trump starts shitting on the military (who he already considers to be “suckers” and “losers”), cuts retirement pay, kills the Veterans Administration, and the move to diminish diversity makes recruiting that much harder, NCOs will retire out or just quit for better opportunities elsewhere and junior enlisted won’t re-up, leaving what is already an understaffed and overstretched military fraying in the middle. There is certainly a contingent of pro-MAGA and Christian Nationalists in the military but most of them (like Pete Hegseth) are not particularly competent or careerists because they have a difficult time following orders or working within a corporate structure. Purge the
non-loyalist flag officers, enrage your senior NCO corps into leaving, and alienate your recruiting base, and suddenly you have a military consisting of a bunch of expensive toys nobody knows how to play with. It really wouldn’t take long to turn the US military into the Keystone Kops, and it is a hard slog to rebuild from there.
You may believe this but I do not think this is the case. Officers who have held on long enough to make flag, and O-6s within spitting distance of getting their flag are order followers by nature but they are also officers who have worked under multiple administrations with different goals and have been conditions to avoid conflict or being seen as excessively partisan lest it hurt their chances of future promotion (which at that level is as much about politics as merit). These are not men and women who align themselves strongly with ideology; they are ones who avoid controversial alignments and public opinions. If you polled Air Force generals on whether they would accept and execute an order to unilaterally bomb Canada I doubt you’d find half a dozen who wouldn’t reflexively respond, “Of course not!” And invading Greenland, especially in peacetime, is such a stupid and pointless exercise I think all responses would be involuntary sarcasm. You occasionally get your Mike Flynn’s somehow slipping through this filter but not en masse, and it isn’t as if Flynn was a particularly noteworthy or trusted leader, being essentially vilified for releasing classified material to terrorists and close associations with Russian Intelligence.
Stranger