Trump’s catalog of constitutional crimes: Long and getting longer

 https://peoplesworld.org/article/trumps-catalog-of-constitutional-crimes-long-and-getting-longer/

People are resisting but overall things are getting worse not better.....

• Challenging the right of anyone of color to be a U.S. citizen, despite the clear, blunt language of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment. It says “all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the states wherein their reside.”  

Trump lost a “birthright citizenship” challenge in the lower courts. His administration appealed it to the Supreme Court and a ruling is expected by late June or early July.

 2) Using the Alien Enemies Act of 1789 to have ICE agents summarily remove and deport people—alleged Venezuelan gang members—without due process of law, as the Constitution’s 5th Amendment guarantees.

 A Trump-named U.S. District Judge in South Texas ruled against one AEA removal Trump ordered. The Ronald Reagan-named judge says that law can only be invoked in times of “declared war or invasion or predatory incursion.”

• Millions of privacy violations, all to both gather information on individual Americans while also opening them up to the private greed of former Trump partner Elon Musk, then head of Trump-named “Department of Government Efficiency” teams. 

DOGE computer nerds seized sensitive confidential financial information about individuals from the IRS, medical information from the Department of Health and Human Services, and data about labor law cases from the Labor Department, among others.

That’s unconstitutional. The 4th Amendment specifies a right to privacy: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated” except when there’s “probable cause” backed by sworn search warrants. DOGE, of course, had neither.

4)  Punishing political enemies, including law firms and universities. Trump punished the law firms for defending his opponents by restricting their rights to practice in front of the government and threatening to cut off their clients. 

  Kirkland & Ellis, a Chicago-based firm that provided partner Albert Jenner, a key House Judiciary Committee counsel during Richard Nixon’s impeachment, didn’t cave. It beat Trump.

• Executive orders yanking business from the law firms and threatening clients also “appear to be unconstitutional and in violation of multiple sections of the Bill of Rights,” CAP said.

One federal judge called such “using the powers of the federal government to target lawyers for their representation of clients and avowed progressive employment policies in an overt attempt to suppress and punish certain viewpoints contrary to the Constitution.” That violated the constitutional protections for freedom of speech, equal protection of the laws, due process, and the right to counsel.

 6) Trump also pursues vendettas against leading universities, which he alleges aren’t cracking down on—and violating the free speech rights of—peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters. His actions feature yanking all the federal research grants they get, and, in Harvard’s case, actually trying to ban it from accepting foreign students. Harvard hasn’t caved—yet. Columbia has.

 Breaking the Constitution’s “speech and debate clause” protecting lawmakers from being sued for whatever they say in Congress. Ed Martin, Trump’s controversial interim U.S. Attorney for D.C. “sent letters to Democratic members of Congress and senators purporting to investigate their public political speech as criminal threats.” Martin became too hot for even Trump to handle. He asked Trump to withdraw his nomination. 

 In another constitutional violation Martin warned top law schools “to end diversity, equity, and inclusion programs or their graduates would be blacklisted from Justice Department jobs.”

Trump cites two Supreme Court rulings, overturning affirmative action in college admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, as justification for banning DEI programs government-wide, including in firms and universities that receive federal grants and money.

Trump’s Education Department—or what’s left of it—sent word to school districts nationwide to shut their DEI programs or face the loss of federal Title I student aid to schools with high shares of poor kids.

Prohibits free speech restrictions

“The First Amendment prohibits the government from mandating a speech code and prohibiting free association for the public,” one progressive legal analysis says. “The 5th Amendment prohibits the government from punishing people and privately held organizations without due process of law.”

• Using tariffs as a bargaining bludgeon against enemies and allies alike, while claiming, with little evidence, that his high tariffs, especially against China, will bring factory jobs back to the U.S. Several unions agree with him. The AFL-CIO is more dubious, saying high tariffs can be used to help counter—and stop-foreign trade cheating. The Manhattan-based U.S. Court of International Trade had no doubt at all. The Constitution gives Congress, not the president, “the power to lay and collect tariffs,” it declared—in a lawsuit brought by right-wingers: The Koch Brothers and the Federalist Society.  
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  he New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), a group associated with Leonard Leo (a co-chairman of the Federalist Society) and funded by Charles Koch's network, sued to challenge the tariffs on China
  . A separate group, the Liberty Justice Center, with past ties to a Koch-affiliated donor, also filed a lawsuit. These legal challenges argue that President Trump overstepped his constitutional authority by imposing tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which they say is not intended for tariffs...
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• Withholding money Congress appropriated. Nixon tried this, too, and Congress struck back in 1973 with the anti-Impoundment Act. Trump’s doing it now, say the top Democrats on congressional appropriations committees, which actually help dole out federal funds. 

“The Trump Administration is breaking the law and undermining the Constitution every day by illegally stealing funds for the programs that help American families and businesses, firing career civil servants without cause, and dismantling agencies created by acts of Congress,” says one of the two, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn.

“If presidents can decide when to spend and not spend all on their own, then Congress becomes little more than an advisory body to a monarch. Certainly that’s what the framers thought,” the Brennan Center for Law and Justice adds.

• “The Trump-appointed acting director of the Office of Management and Budget ordered a government-wide impoundment of trillions of dollars that Congress,” the Brennan Center adds. That would end, OMB said, “after it reviewed whether agency activities implicate policies the president opposes, specifically citing ‘DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.’ It created immediate chaos” and lower court wins against Trump.

“In the words of one court, the budget office’s order ‘fundamentally undermines the distinct constitutional roles of each branch of our government,” especially Congress’s power of the purse,” the Brennan Center said.