In defending rule of law, Supreme Court jusices stumble [View all]

By Noah Feldman / Bloomberg Opinion

This will go down as the year when the president of the United States openly went to war against the rule of law. I’ve been writing about the many battles of this war throughout 2025. In this column, I’m going to zoom out and take a broad view of the overall state of the battlefield, with special attention to the main combatants defending the law: the lower federal courts, which are the frontline troops; and the Supreme Court justices, who serve as the generals of the joint chiefs of staff.

The first thing to understand about the conflict is that President Donald Trump’s primary weapon is unilateral executive action. He started issuing executive orders that violate constitutional and legal norms on day one of his administration.

Through the shock troops of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the president indiscriminately fired federal employees, shut down entire departments created by Congress, and canceled billions of dollars in federal contracts and grants allocated by law. Through the Department of Justice as well as other cabinet departments and commissions, he has targeted the speech rights of anyone who disagrees with him.

You’ll notice that Congress is nowhere in this attack strategy. Its unwillingness or inability to act in the face of the offensive brings home, more powerfully than anything else, just how much this branch of government has withered away in recent decades. I’m not going to speak much more about Congress in this column; because, rather than being a participant in the war, Congress is effectively an irrelevant bystander.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-in-defending-rule-of-law-supreme-court-jusices-stumble/