Legal experts are having a "collective heart attack" — and no one is more responsible for enabling a radicalized second term for President Donald Trump and "legal emergency" than the U.S. Supreme Court, an analyst said on Tuesday.
Some people have suggested we are in the midst of a constitutional crisis, Salon columnist Heather Digby Parton wrote.
"Legal scholars, former judges and law professors are having a collective heart attack over what the administration, particularly the Justice Department and Supreme Court, are doing to the rule of law and the Constitution. Right now, the only bulwark appears to be the lower courts," Digby Parton writes.
The writer pointed to a 2024 New York Times interview with "50 highly respected members of the legal establishment," where those interviewed signaled they were concerned about the second Trump presidency "based on what he had done in the first." Some argued that the Department of Justice would maintain its integrity and qualified people with experience would continue to lead the agency, but that attitude changed.
"When the Times recently caught up with these former officials, their hair was on fire," according to the writer, explaining that eight months after Trump took office, those warnings have now prompted the same legal experts to say they are "very, very worried."
“Trump has taken a wrecking ball to those beliefs. ‘What’s happening is anathema to everything we’ve ever stood for in the Department of Justice,'" a former official who worked with both Democrats and Republicans told The Times.
About half of the people interviewed were Republicans, many who worked for Trump in the first administration, she added.
And “all but one of the respondents rated Trump’s second term as a greater or much greater threat to the rule of law than his first term. They consistently characterized the president’s abuses of power — wielding the law to justify his wishes — as being far worse than they imagined before his re-election.”
Most of them didn't expect "internet trolls" Kash Patel and Dan Bongino to be appointed to key leadership positions and execute Trump's demands.
But that's not the only problem.
The Supreme Court has issued "terse orders on these shadow docket rulings, most of which have overturned their judgments to favor the president’s position — and leaving them vulnerable to threats from right-wing commentators, and even the White House."
"The court’s immunity decision alone gave Trump the green light to do whatever he wanted and let everyone else pick up the pieces. Coupled with the misuse and abuse of the court’s emergency — or 'shadow' — docket, the conservative majority has only reinforced the idea that the president is to be given total latitude without constitutional restraint," the author explains.
This has created a ripple effect on lower courts and issued more warning signals from legal experts.
"But there can be little doubt we are in the midst of an historic legal emergency — and, so far, the only people who appear to be preventing our system of justice from crumbling entirely are the states and lower federal courts. May they have the fortitude to hold out, or things will get much worse," Digby Parton writes.