House speaker Mike Johnson downplayed president Donald Trump's defiance of court decisions blocking his executive orders, but a legal expert said his claims were completely off base.
The Louisiana Republican expressed agreement with vice president J.D. Vance's position that "judges aren’t allowed to control the executive branch’s legitimate power," which Johnson justified by claiming that former president Joe Biden had "literally trampled over the rule of law," but former U.S. attorney Michael Moore told CNN the comparison was invalid.
"You're 100-percent right to point out, in fact, that Biden was not and did not violate court orders that came down," Moore told host Jim Sciutto. "That's sort of been the threat we're hearing from Trump and his team is they talk about this, but when Biden tried to forgive student debt en masse to this wide group of people under the Heroes Act, which was a congressional act, the Supreme Court ultimately said that he had essentially overstepped his ability to control policy, and that he did not have the power to do that because Congress controls the purse and he could not come in with those type of sweeping changes and acts solely because he was the executive."
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"He did find other ways through other programs, some through service-oriented jobs, some through need-based things that he allowed, and he implemented policies that had been existing and expanded those somewhat to cover the student debt," added Moore, who served as a U.S. attorney and Democratic state senator in Georgia. "But he followed things that were already in place to, in fact, eliminate debt for some people."
Those actions bear little resemblance to the sweeping cuts to congressionally approved agencies and expenditures that billionaire Elon Musk was making across the federal government through his Trump-sanctioned Department of Government Efficiency, Moore said.
"That's the difference here, is that there's been this sort of sweeping Musk paintbrush that has gone over the government and shut things down that have already been congressionally decided and put in place outside the power of the executive," Moore said. "So that's the distinction that some of my Republican friends who seem to be getting the vapors now that there's any question about the executive's authority. That's the difference that they're missing."
"I saw earlier in your clip, the speaker is pulling things out of thin air when he suggests somehow that there's a reticence [among Democrats] or a recognition now, at least to the law," he added.
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