An analysis has found that the Trump White House has taken actions to defy one out of every three judicial rulings against the president’s actions.
The examination of 160 lawsuits, conducted by The Washington Post, suggests “widespread noncompliance with America’s legal system” on the part of President Donald Trump and his administration, the analysis concluded.
What’s more, the administration seems to be taking advantage of the fact that the judicial system is slow to consider, begin or follow through on contempt proceedings — meaning that their noncompliance often goes unpunished. Indeed, none of the judges whose orders have been ignored have tried to force compliance in the form of punitive orders, The Post’s analysis found.
Part of the reason judges may be reluctant to take such action is that they may want to avoid a constitutional crisis — such punitive orders, while issued by judges, are followed up by the U.S. Marshals Service, whose director is an executive branch appointee, meaning that the agency, under Trump’s orders, may also ignore judicial decrees.
The Post examined 337 lawsuits in total, finding 165 cases in which judges had ruled against the administration. The Trump White House has been accused of “defying or frustrating court oversight” in 57 cases, or around 35 percent of rulings or orders made against them, the analysis found — an unprecedented amount, according to legal experts speaking to the publication.
The White House appears to be seeking to sidestep court orders on immigration cases in particular, the data shows. Rulings on federal funding cuts or the firings of federal workers were also frequently ignored, according to the analysis.
Transgender journalist Erin Reed recently reported that the administration is also failing to abide by rulings on LGBTQ rights, including in a case that would allow transgender people to continue updating gender markers on their passports. Citing a source within the government, Reed noted that the “noncompliance is intentional,” and is a deliberate “stalling” of the order as the appeals process continues.
The White House typically justifies these actions by claiming that judges are biased against them, with Trump oftentimes asserting, without evidence, that rulings he disagrees with are from “radical left judges.”
The Washington Post’s analysis seems to confirm concerns from a Department of Justice (DOJ) whistleblower earlier this year. The whistleblower report by Erez Reuveni, a former DOJ employee, stated that Emil Bove, the DOJ’s principal associate deputy attorney general, frequently told colleagues that the administration should ignore court orders. When Reuveni tried to correct actions his coworkers were taking that appeared to follow through on that directive, he was “threatened, fired and publicly disparaged,” he said in his report.
Bove was recently nominated by Trump to become a federal judge in the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Republican-controlled Congress appears to be no help in the matter, either — indeed, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) has sided with Trump, suggesting that judges should be punished in some way for issuing orders against the president’s actions.
“We can eliminate an entire district court,” Johnson told reporters in March.
While Republican lawmakers appear to be aligning themselves with Trump’s subversion of orders, polling suggests that voters are concerned about the administration’s refusal to comply.
A Demand Justice/Global Strategy Group poll released in June examined voters’ attitudes in battleground states. The poll found that, while voters were split almost evenly along self-identified political lines, a majority of them, 53 percent, disapproved of Trump’s response to court decrees, with nearly three-quarters of voters in the poll, 72 percent, saying they are “concerned about Trump’s attempts to refuse to obey court orders.” A majority of voters, 52 percent, also said they viewed Trump’s defiance as “an abuse of power.”
It is “very clear that voters overwhelmingly do not support Trump’s attacks on the rule of law and the courts,” Demand Justice wrote in its press release of the poll’s results. “All of us who care about the rule of law, the Constitution and our democracy must push back against these attacks.”
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