Donald Trump’s recent legal filing to the Supreme Court regarding a possible ban on the popular TikTok app was largely met with ridicule and bewilderment by legal experts, who doubted the incoming president’s legal basis for his request.
With the court poised to rule on the ban, an attorney for the president-elect submitted a brief on Friday asking the high court to suspend the law’s Jan. 19 deadline until Trump is sworn in so he can attempt to negotiate a compromise.
But the Supreme Court simply lacks the authority to act on Trump’s unprecedented request, former DOJ official Alan Rozenshtein told Politico.
“The fact that the law goes into effect the day before Trump is inaugurated is just too bad for Trump, but a future president cannot ask a court to delay a law,” Rozenshtein said.
While Rozenshtein labeled the brief as “silly,” he added that he expects the incoming president’s legal request to be seriously considered.
“But I hope they don’t act on it,” he told the publication. “It would be pretty lawless of them to.”
Stephen Vladeck, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, took aim at John Sauer – the brief’s author and Trump’s nominee for solicitor general.
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“All in all, a not-terribly-auspicious start for the incoming Solicitor General and President-Elect,” Vladeck wrote in a Substack post. “I don’t doubt that the brief will come up during the oral argument on January 10. But I’d be rather floored if a majority of the Court were to rely upon it.”
Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard University law professor and senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, added that Sauer’s legal filing “diminishes his credibility before the court even before assuming office,” according to Politico, which noted that even “right-of-center legal scholars” were surprised by what Trump was asking of the justices.
Still, Josh Blackman, a conservative professor of constitutional law at the South Texas College of Law Houston, wrote that while he “can’t think of a comparable example where the incoming President has sought to counteract the current President before the Supreme Court,” “we are living in strange times,” Politico reported.
“Trump’s brief at least ups the odds for TikTok, ever so slightly,” Blackman said.