Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Leah Litman: Thanks for having me.
Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): Now, before I take questions, I would like to address an extremely dishonest narrative that we’ve seen emerging over the past few days. Many outlets in this room have been fearmongering the American people into believing there is a constitutional crisis taking place here at the White House. I’ve been hearing those words a lot lately. But in fact, the real constitutional crisis is taking place within our judicial branch, where district court judges and liberal districts across the country are abusing their power to unilaterally block President Trump’s basic executive authority. We believe these judges are acting as judicial activists rather than honest arbiters of the law. And they have issued at least 12 injunctions against this administration in the past 14 days, often without citing any evidence or grounds for their lawsuits.
Litman: There’s a lot to unpack with this statement. One is it’s a little rich for this administration to come in and all of a sudden have a problem with district judges issuing nationwide injunctions against president’s policies. If you remember, the last four years of the Biden administration and, before Trump 1.0, the Obama administration, it was district courts in Texas issuing nationwide injunctions against basically many of the things those presidents were doing. And you did not see any Republicans having any problems with that and with litigants judge shopping—they would purposely go to places where they could pick their judges. Here, litigants are filing in courts where they don’t actually know what judge they’re going to draw. So that’s one thing.
Sargent: There’s a reason the injunctions are flowing so furiously. Look in the mirror, people. Let’s try to take stock of where things are now. The courts have blocked an across-the-board funding freeze, blocked access to Treasury Department payment systems, blocked the administration from laying off a few thousand USAID workers, blocked big cuts to medical research, blocked the transfer of three migrants to Guantanamo, blocked an end to birthright citizenship. That’s only a partial list. Leah, I know some of these are not complete wins, but it still seems like the courts are really stepping up here. What’s your overall assessment of what’s happening? How many of these rulings do you think will survive?
The executive branch was really asserting the authority to completely run roughshod over a coordinate branch of government. And you have the courts saying, Actually, that’s not how this works. So they are stopping some of the more brazenly, transparently illegal instances where the executive branch is just disregarding Congress and acting in violation of congressional statutes. So I think a fair number of these are going to hold up down the road. And I think that speaks to just how, again, extreme the administration’s positions are in some of these cases, and also to what slapdash chaotic work they’ve done. They have not attempted to put forward any explanation for why they are suddenly doing these things without notice. So it’s just not a surprise that courts are pausing them.
Sargent: Well, it seems like we need a bit of a bigger confrontation between the courts and the administration more directly over Elon Musk’s role as head of the Department of Government Efficiency. Musk seems to be doing a lot of the illegal stuff. He got blocked when it came to the Treasury payments and so forth. Is it possible that we get a lawsuit that goes up to the Supreme Court in which the high court puts limits on DOGE and Musk? What might that look like?
Sargent: Is there any prospect for a broad ruling which actually does implicate his role in a bigger sense, or is that just too much to hope for?
But that reality is I can imagine this court doing some of the squirrelly things it has oftentimes done in the past and say, Well, this is all being done under the direction of the president, and look, we don’t know actually whether they totally prohibited all the funds from being spent after courts told them, No, you can’t actually refuse to spend money Congress has allocated. So that’s part of where my uncertainty is coming from.
Litman: The answer is I don’t know. It is hard to know what these people are doing. It is just so chaotic. I’m certainly not sure what is going to happen a day, two days, two weeks from now, much less two months. As to what they are saying or doing, I’m of two minds. On one hand, I think it is possible that they could and would defy court orders because they have already asserted that the executive branch basically has Congress’s powers; that they are going to disregard at least one coordinate branch, so why not go for a twofer, right? They are already reflecting authoritarian autocratic impulses, consolidating power that I think could lead them to do that.
Of course, one could change and influence the other. And we are right to be concerned, and we shouldn’t expect them to do it and normalize it. This is, again, hugely concerning, but the answer is I just don’t know. And I think it’s going to depend on what pushback they get from different quarters.
Litman: Yeah. One of the cases you mentioned where the Trump administration was told No by a federal court is where they announced we’re basically no longer going to pay out all of the research expenses under the National Institutes for Health that had gone to major research universities to fund jobs. These were not just money that were paying for research at universities, but they were also significant job programs that funded support roles, administrative roles for the communities in these areas. So a judge said, No, you can’t actually refuse to pay out the money that Congress had basically told you to at the rights that had been established by law. And there had been some uncertainty since that ruling about whether the National Institutes for Health was, in fact, paying out the funds and complying with the court order. There was some conflicting reporting—some suggesting some grant recipients were not receiving money, even though they should be.
Sargent: Speaking of Republican lawmakers, The Hill reports that a number of them are now calling on the Trump administration to respect court rulings. Senate Majority Leader John Thune grudgingly said he hopes Trump will listen to the courts. Senator Lisa Murkowski said the White House should comply with court rulings. I have to say, I’m glad to hear this from Senate Republicans, but if Trump does start to defy court rulings, should we have any confidence at all that Republicans will step up at that point?
I don’t know if the administration actually came out and said, We’re going to defy this court order, what exactly Senate Republicans and Republicans of the House would do. I’m of two minds. Again, they seem willing to fall in line with Donald Trump in many meaningful respects that violate their own oath, that disrupt the constitutional system. On the other hand, I think it might depend what court order we’re talking about. If it’s one of these things that the Trump administration is doing that could damage the entire United States economy, damage their own states, that’s going to give them some additional pause.
Sargent: Right. Some of the Republicans with a bit of a longer memory know that the power pendulum is going to swing again, and they’re going to need their judges to step up and stop Democratic stuff. It’s probably worth noting, by the way, that these warnings or these demands for compliance with the courts from Senate Republicans come even at the time that they’re rolling over entirely for Trump’s nominees. Tulsi Gabbard just got confirmed as director of national intelligence, which is a travesty. It looks like RFK Jr. will unbelievably get in on health and human services, God help us. Maybe some of these Republicans are glad to have someone else—the courts—slowing down Trump so they don’t have to do it. They don’t want to face all sorts of blowback from MAGA and Trump voters and, let’s face it, death threats as well. What do you think?
Sargent: It’s funny you say that because the subtext of it is that a lot of Republicans are acting as if we are going to have elections going forward.
Sargent: What’s your overall assessment of where it’s all going? Do you think maybe in six months, half of Trump’s agenda is blocked in court and they’re going to just have to go through Congress to do a lot of stuff? And by the way, let’s remind people they’re working very hard at doing really terrible things through Congress right now, so we shouldn’t get too optimistic about all this. But what’s your overall assessment? Do we end up maybe six months down the line with a chunk of Trump’s agenda stopped?
I think a lot of awful stuff will, both through Congress and through the executive branch. Because of the Supreme Court’s decisions, he can fire the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and replace him with someone who is not going to do anything to protect consumers from corporate abuse and fraud on the market. And that is, again, legal under the current system. So there are things he is going to be able to do on his own that are going to be destructive.
Sargent: Just to bring this back to Karoline Leavitt, it does appear to me that MAGA is going to be extremely unhappy if a bunch of this stuff does get blocked. From the MAGA base and from institutional MAGA like Fox News and the think tanks and those types and the John Eastmans of the world, the pressure to defy the courts is going to get awfully intense, don’t you think? Where does that end up?
Sargent: And they’re raising the expectations of MAGA voters that the courts will be defied, which to me is a really worrying point. What it ends up doing is they’re really going all the way out to casting the courts as the enemy of Trump and MAGA, and once they start down that road, who the hell knows what happens.
Sargent: Can’t they just blame everything on Biden instead of blaming it on the courts?
Sargent: Well, Karoline Leavitt certainly signaled a pretty ugly future for all this stuff. Leah Litman, thank you so much for talking to us. Great discussion. Really appreciate it.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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