Donald Trump is preparing to start unilaterally passing major legislative items on his agenda without Congressional approval via executive order based on how a former George W. Bush official is interpreting a recent Supreme Court decision that did not go Trump’s way.
When the Supreme Court left DACA intact, it was a major win for immigration advocates and the hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.
But shady lawyer John Yoo, who infamously wrote the memo defending the use of torture during the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11, is saying that the decision gives Trump the ability to pass whatever laws he wants. Seriously.
Yoo claimed in a recent article that the decision “makes it easy for presidents to violate the law, but reversing such violations difficult — especially for their successors.”
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And the first move Trump apparently intends to make using this so-called “loophole” that Yoo pulled out of his a** is to enact all of the immigration policies he has been demanding.
“We’re working out the legal complexities right now, but I’m going to be signing a very major immigration bill as an executive order, which the Supreme Court now, because of the DACA decision, has given me the power to do that,” Trump claimed in a statement.
But that’s not all Trump can do, Yoo argued.
“Suppose President Donald Trump decided to create a nationwide right to carry guns openly,” Yoo wrote. “He could declare that he would not enforce federal firearms laws, and that a new ‘Trump permit’ would free any holder of state and local gun-control restrictions. Even if Trump knew that his scheme lacked legal authority, he could get away with it for the length of his presidency. And, moreover, even if courts declared the permit illegal, his successor would have to keep enforcing the program for another year or two.”
Yeah, this is the kind of bullsh*t that makes Americans hate lawyers, and it’s why Yoo should be stripped of his law license and barred from ever working in the field in any capacity ever again. He’s literally trying to justify a dictatorship by twisting a Supreme Court ruling.
When Obama enacted DACA, it did not go beyond the scope of presidential authority because it did not change the law. What Yoo is proposing is that Trump can basically kill any law he doesn’t like by issuing an executive order. And that opens the door for him to do anything he wants.
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
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