Powerful defense of principle
Watching the Trump administration run roughshod over Congress and the Republican Party could make a person cynical about American institutions. But the independent judiciary has provided cause for faith in the resilience of our system in the face of a president with little regard for it.
A panel of Republican-appointed judges this week resoundingly rejected the administration’s efforts to force cooperation with its crackdown on immigrants by stripping funding from cities that won’t make their police officers federal foot soldiers. At the same time, the Chicago-based Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals mounted a heartening defense of the separation of powers, a bedrock constitutional principle that, whether or not President Trump likes or appreciates it, imposes valuable constraints on every chief executive.
“The founders of our country well understood that the concentration of power threatens individual liberty and established a bulwark against such tyranny by creating a separation of powers,” Judge Ilana Rovner wrote for the panel. “If the executive branch can determine policy, and then use the power of the purse to mandate compliance with that policy ... that check against tyranny is forsaken.”
An appointee of George H.W. Bush whose family fled Latvia during the rise of Nazi Germany, Rovner notes that the legislative branch holds the purse strings and that Congress has done nothing to indicate that the law enforcement grant at issue is contingent on immigration enforcement. “It falls to us, the judiciary, as the remaining branch of the government, to act as a check on such usurpation of power,” she continues. “We are a country that jealously guards the separation of powers, and we must be ever-vigilant in that endeavor.”
Upholding a lower-court ruling in favor of Chicago’s right to retain federal funding even if it doesn’t help the federal government round up undocumented immigrants, the first appeals court ruling on the issue also followed decisions in favor of similar policies in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Santa Clara County and San Francisco, where the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments on the subject last week. Beyond the separate government branches, the cases bolster another crucial check on the president: state and local power.
Contrary to administration rhetoric, so-called sanctuary cities aren’t thwarting federal authorities. Rather, they’re declining to actively participate in immigration enforcement, which is the sort of question of local law enforcement policy that — again, whether or not the president likes or appreciates it — is normally beyond federal reach.
Trump has chafed at the judiciary as much as at every other restriction on his power, publicly attacking judges who rule against the administration, impugning one jurist’s impartiality based on his Mexican ancestry, and even reportedly grousing that his own appointee to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, has been too liberal in his rulings. Judging by the administration’s unenviable record in court, these attacks on judicial independence have been a deserved failure.