So apparently Trump doesn’t like people going against him. Shocker. He’s fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates and already sworn in her replacement. Though…I thought they were still going through the process of voting that person in? I’m so confused and scared at the same time. I need to get more serious about finding me a Canadian marriage of convenience.
For “betraying the administration”. Are we turning into fucking Uganda, or what?
ETA: The memo actually says “betraying the Department of Justice”. Still rather Orwellian.
And look at the statement from the White House(part of it).
Trump can’t resist slagging someone he fired.
Maybe Bricker could chime in here, but after these State AGs refusing to defend same sex marriage bans and now this, I am of the opinion that there should be some ethics charges filed against this acting AG.
Why? Your job is to defend your client, not vindicate your own personal beliefs. If personally you are ardently pro-life and believe abortion is murder, that is fine. But if your client is on home incarceration and wants to leave to get an abortion, you start writing motions and sound like Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
It was what I was taught in law school, and I believe that this acting AG is committing an ethical violation by refusing to defend her client.
That’s certainly one way to look at it, but my question would be this: Does not the AG take an oath to support and defend the Constitution, against all enemies, foreign and domestic? This would seem, to me at least, to override any ethical obligation to the President in cases where the two come into conflict.
I’m not going to pretend I know all the ins and outs of most government positions, let along the AG but she defended her actions by saying this:
I mean if that really IS what the job is, I guess her standing up for what she believes is right is ok?? I dunno. I think it might be a dangerous precedent to set, especially given who took over the position.
The AG is the chief legal officer of the United States. The President of the United States is not their client, that’s why the President has a White House Counsel.
Trump has also fired the acting head of ICE, without explanation.
He’s also fired Daniel Ragsdale, acting director of immigration enforcement and Thomas Countryman the acting undersecretary for arms control and international security (who was fired in mid-flight to a nuclear weapons conference).
Ultra Vires, we both know that there are ethical limits on what we can do in defending our client. We are not simply mouthpieces of the client who say whatever the client instructs us to say, dressed up in legal language.
If you are defending your client on a criminal charge and the client says, “I’m going to perjure myself on the stand. My instructions to you are to facilitate it”, we both know that you have to refuse to take those instructions.
If you have a client who gives you those kind of instructions, you may decide to take yourself off the case (i.e., you fire the client), or you may say “I won’t take those instructions, but I’ll do everything I can within the legal scope of my professional boundaries to assist you,” which may result in the client firing you.
Either way, if you think the client is asking you to do something illegal on their behalf, you have an obligation to refuse to take those instructions.
The situation the Acting AG faced may be more of a grey area, but the principle is the same: if her client gives her instructions that she believes, in her best legal opinion, cross the line into illegality, she has to refuse to take those instructions.
The law isn’t her “personal beliefs”, and obeying illegal orders could at the very least have caused her to lose her license to practice law.
Meh. It’s just political posturing. Sally Yates was a political appointee and would have been replaced anyway. She’s just emphasised her Democrat credentials to other Democrats. If it were a professional matter, she would have resigned.
She was asked to stay on by the Trump transition team until the new Attorney General was confirmed.
The President of the United States is not her client. The people of the United States are her client. The Attorney General is not the President’s personal counsel.
Also, during Yates’ confirmation hearing she answered a question for Jeff Sessions, coincidentally on this very topic:
I don’t think that’s an accurate summary of the position of the Attorney General.
The President is the head of the executive, and charged with seeing that the laws are faithfully executed. That is a public function, not personal one. The Attorney General is not a separate executive officer; there is a unitary executive in the US. The AG’s function is to give advice to the President in his public capacity on how to ensure the laws are faithfully executed, and is also to implement the President’s instructions on what, in the President’s view, amounts to faithful execution of the laws.
If there is a serious disagreement between the President and the AG on what constitutes faithful execution, one of them has to give way, and that is usually the individual holding the position of AG, to be replaced by someone who agrees with the President’s views (see the Saturday Night Massacre).
So it’s not correct that the AG is the people’s lawyer. The AG is the lawyer for the public administration of federal laws, as part of the President’s Cabinet. The AG is not a separate executive office, as is the case in some states, where the state AG is elected directly by the people and has a different relationship to the Governor.
I don’t think I agree with this.
In the first place, the law had already been cleared by the DOJ as to its legality. So it’s not like she was being asked to do something that was clearly illegal. Her legal position was at best an ambiguous one. (This also seems to be the consensus of legal scholars out there.) She herself seemed to acknowledge this, in saying that she had an obligation to do what is “just” besides for what’s technically legal. That effectively means she would only enforce laws/orders that she personally agreed with, which is not the same thing at all as refusing to enforce illegal ones.
Beyond all that, even if she really felt it was clearly illegal and such, she should have resigned the position. Staying in her position and directing all DOJ employees to refuse to enforce orders of the POTUS is IMO an outrage and a threat to democracy.
You’re never going to have perfect agreement on what’s correct, legal, just, wise etc. The principle of democracy is that people vote for officials who control the process of government. The idea that appointed officials have autonomy to disregard the elected officials who they ostensibly report to is a threat to the system.
This is a high profile issue, and it ended sort of well, in that she got properly sacked. (Though it’s unfortunate that she will undoubtedly become a hero to Democrats.) But it’s a terrible precedent. And it could have ramifications in emboldening other appointed officials to consider themselves unbound by anything other than their own determination of what’s legal or just, whether in lower profile cases or in cases where the officials are better situated strategically.
[It’s interesting that when questioned directly about this issue, in the quote cited by madmonk28, Yates herself did not say that she would disobey orders from the president. Only that she would provide independent advice, which is something else entirely.]
But how far does this attitude go, in your opinion? I think there are circumstances in which the right thing to do might require such public disobedience. They can be fired, of course, as Yates was. But how is an appointed public official stating publicly “this is wrong and I won’t do it” a threat to democracy?
I thought I explained this already. The whole point of democracy is that elected officials have the power to run the government.The idea that appointed officials have autonomy to decide for themselves whether or not to take orders from their elected overseers is obviously a threat to this.
They can be fired, though – so how is this a threat? Further, aren’t there sometimes principles even more important than this (say, an official in antebellum USA, or Nazi Germany, deliberately disobeying orders in order to to free slaves/Jews)?
It’s a threat to democracy because it usurps authority. The AG is suppose to enforce the law, not set policy. If Yates presents a solid argument as to why she believes the Executive Order is outright illegal, then sure, she’s within bounds to not enforce the Order and to not defend it, but that’s not what happened. If she felt that strongly about it, she should have simply stated that she could not, in good conscience, obey the order. Her show of public disobedience should have been to resign.