The U.S. may have narrowly avoided a Constitutional crisis after insiders in the Trump administration temporarily thwarted a plan to suspend habeas corpus, but the risks don't end there, one legal expert warned on Wednesday.
Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and President Donald Trump had cooked up an idea to suspend habeas corpus, the right that requires the government to explain why they have detained someone. The idea was to speed up Trump's deportation operations by arguing that illegal immigration constituted an "invasion" that required the president to enact his emergency powers, according to the report.
It was thwarted by White House staff secretary Will Scharf, whose memo to Susie Wiles, Trump's chief of staff, convinced the administration not to pursue the suspension at that time, the report added.
Harry Litman, a former federal prosecutor, argued in a new Substack essay that the scheme was "utterly tyrannical and anti-constitutional," and also revealed that the administration is unlikely to stop pursuing the goal.
"Even as the administration shied away from the breathtaking move of literally suspending habeas corpus, it has taken other steps to try to achieve a similar end," Litman wrote.
He noted that the Trump administration has argued that the president's emergency powers are unquestionable in court cases, used a similar "invasion" framing to justify its activating the National Guard in response to protests, and its attempts to suspend residency for immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for decades.
"We now know how close we came to a historic assertion of presidential power to suspend the most fundamental of constitutional rights for patently unjustified reasons," Litman wrote. "Fortunately, an instinct by the staff secretary for keeping the administration from driving off the constitutional cliff, combined with bureaucratic lassitude, staved off the crisis. But it didn’t end the efforts to make Trump a government of one, and if the past is prelude, the administration isn’t done trying."
