Heather Cox Richardson reported in her substack this morning that Judge Boasberg is pursuing the government over their disregard of his ruling to halt the deportations to El Salvador. I can't say it any better so will quote her paragraphs on this in their entirety.
Today,
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg issued an opinion saying that the
administration’s “hurried removal” of the men to El Salvador after Boasberg had
issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) prohibiting them from doing so,
demonstrated “a wilful disregard for its Order, sufficient for the Court to
conclude that probable cause exists to find the Government in criminal
contempt.”
“The
Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial
orders—especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to
uphold it,” Boasberg wrote. Quoting Chief Justice John Marshall, who laid down
the foundations of much of America law, Boasberg wrote: “To permit such
officials to freely ‘annul the judgments of the courts of the United States’
would not just ‘destroy the rights acquired under those judgments’; it would
make ‘a solemn mockery’ of ‘the constitution itself.’”
If the
government decides not to try to repair its contempt, Boasberg says the court
will use declarations, hearings, or depositions to identify the individuals
responsible for making the judgment to ignore the court. Then he will ask the
government to prosecute the contempt, but if—as is likely—it refuses, Boasberg
says he will appoint a private prosecutor to move the case along. As legal
analyst Joyce White Vance puts it: “These cases are about making sure that,
American citizen or not, criminal or not, peoples’ right to have the day in
court that the Constitution guarantees them is honored. That’s all. But it’s
everything.”
Yesterday David French in an Op-Ed published in a NYT April
16 newsletter, made the point that the Supreme Court’s rulings may not solve
the current issues but are necessary first steps. He compared it with the 1954
decision Brown v Board of Education which established that segregated schools
(essentially barring Black students from “white” schools) was unconstitutional.
That ruling wasn’t sufficient to end segregation, which wasn’t complete until
2016 when the last school district in Mississippi became desegregated, but was
a necessary first step.
French wrote “… the best Supreme Court decisions don’t just have legal
force, they represent a moral indictment of rogue presidents and rogue
governments.”
The Courts may not have their own police force but they do
have power, especially when they support rights that are dear to most Americans.
In this case it’s the right not to have secret police break into your home in
the middle of the night, arrest you without a warrant or charge, and send you
to a concentration camp without a trial, all on the whim of the president.
Sources:
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