Steve Vladeck on the Trump Administration, the Courts, and the Rule of Law

Conversations with Bill Kristol

Where do things stand fifty days into Trump’s second term?
According to Georgetown Law professor Steve Vladeck: “We’ve never seen such a wholesale attempt on the part of a president [to] hollow out the executive branch [and] install loyalists in all of the relevant positions of government.” Amid a blizzard of lawsuits in response to Trump’s executive actions, Vladeck analyzes whether and to what extent the courts, Congress, and other institutions might contain the Trump administration by asserting their own Constitutional prerogatives to defend the rule of law. While he notes that courts may push back on certain executive actions on First Amendment and other grounds, Vladeck argues that the courts simply were not set up to handle the kind of large-scale litigation that might follow from mass terminations in the civil service, for instance. This is a must-watch Conversation for anyone interested in understanding how the separation of powers, a bedrock of our constitutional government, is playing out in our institutions in real time.