Does stonewalling count, though?
The ones that wanted it most, and would benefit from it most, certainly knew. They were counting on it.
It’s also one that I just don’t get. He spends most of his time not even doing his job, and if he has the money he claims to have, he could do any other fucking thing in the world and still be just as useless.
It’s 99% likely that, going into the Presidency, he didn’t have anywhere near the money he claimed to have, and was likely massively in debt. But between Russian ties, Deutsche Bank, his clubs and hotels, and his rallies, being President is a very profitable business, and I’m sure he’d like to keep the gravy train rolling.
I think even the founders recognized that disagreements over law would be pretty common or they wouldn’t have made the judiciary such a big part of government.
It’s not just about whether any individual law is written clearly enough to understand, it’s about determining how each new law fits within the existing ecosystem of laws (including the Constitution). “Marriage shall only be between one man and one woman” is a perfectly clear law, but determining the Constitutionality of such a law requires a much more nuanced understanding of various statutes and Amendments.
funnily enough, it was the supreme court itself which decided that they could over turn law.
also the structure of circuit and appeals courts was never setup in the constitution. the practice predated it, and was then incorporated and tweaked over time by congress.
A well-done half-hour doco on the history:
The USSC basically has whatever powers it chooses to claim that it has, up until the point that somebody decides to arrest the Justices (or pull a Jackson and just ignore them).
Well, 35 out of the 55 “Framers” were lawyers, judges or had read law, so no surprise there.
But is it too much to ask that the people who make the laws at least try to make them within the parameters of the constitution and certain unalienable rights everybody is supposed to have?
And in an unsurprising development, 16 states have sued the Trump admin over the “emergency”. (That’s California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Virginia.)
But as you keep noticing, a lot of people in the US do not agree that those protections should be extended.
So courts get to make a whole bunch of decisions - in large part because the people who don’t like the law, can’t/won’t get enough support to change the law or the constitution (depending on which it is they don’t like).
As I say ignore his claptrap about it being a ‘liberal’ ‘addiction’. “Conservatives” do just as much litigation for political ends. Masterpiece Cakes anyone…?
Lawsuit available here:
If the judicial branch was removed from deciding anything “political”, then everything would only be decided by party politicians.
That would be worse than the situation being complained about.
Judges can strive to be neutral, but they can’t be politically neuter.
I agree with that.
But it is pretty clear (to me at least) that the current situation is not at all what the drafters of your constitution intended.
Take this current scenario with the national emergency declaration. I very much doubt that the original members of congress (much less the drafters of the constitution) would have felt it should be up to the court system to deal with a President ignoring the wishes of Congress.
That is Congress’s job. It has the powers. It appears to lack the will.
Because it lacks the will to act, you get lawsuits like the one linked above. A large part of which is taken up with what is very clearly political rhetoric.
The actual legal argument only starts on about page 30 of 57.
It makes some good points about how the “border wall” is not in fact a ‘military construction’ project and how the requirements of 10 USC 284 are not met.
Arguments about whether or not there really is a ‘national emergency’ do seem to me to go far beyond what a court can properly be asked to determine.
That determination is very clearly left to the President to make.
The drafters weren’t omniscient seers of the future, but they explicitly allowed for judicial oversight. The branches were set up as checks and balances on each other. Everyone has a rope on their legs tied to the other branches. They didn’t do that because they thought only one branch should be trusted with everything.
The “national emergency” language is from Congress, not the framers of the Constitution. Here, the Executive is interpreting that as including the ability to spend money in a way that Congress explicitly showed that it didn’t want to do. The constitution says expenditures have to be okay with Congress. Other “National Emergencies” didn’t change budgets directly against Congress’s wishes like this one. Presidents can call something an emergency, but they can’t claim unlimited budget control from a Congress that disagrees.
In this case, the Executive is explicitly ignoring Congress. That’s exactly when the framers envisioned the Judiciary stepping in.
The difficulty with that is that Congress did explicitly say that they were ok with expenditure in these circumstances. They passed the National Emergencies Act.
Or you can say that the Executive is acting explicitly within the framework for expenditure set by Congress.
It is quite possible to legitimately argue that the system of checks and balances to which you refer - in this case and on the specific issue of ‘is there a national emergency’ - provides that the ‘check’ is Congress.
Clearly issues of whether relevant legislation has been complied with or is engaged fall into the judiciary’s purview but wasting time and effort litigating over whether there is or is not a ‘national emergency’ seems to me pointless.
But then again, that’s why I don’t practice in that field of law and don’t get my cases reported in legal journals. 
You can say both things.
If Congress can be interpreted as saying Yes and No at the exact same time, that’s when the Judiciary has to step in.
Congress also has the power to make it clear either way, but if they don’t, or won’t … Judiciary.
The Executive also can choose to “stay within the lines” of what Congress approved where it doesn’t make them contradictory, but if he doesn’t … Judiciary.
If Trump said that a National Emergency meant he had to confiscate all the assets of Congress to pay for the wall, you’d see this all play out much more quickly.
(They aren’t really arguing whether a President can call something a National Emergency, but whether that means he can ignore Congress’s other wishes, when those other wishes are expressed and directly contradictory.)
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