Harry Litman - Where Law Ends, Trump Begins
At his abomination in the Department of Justice last week, Donald Trump waxed scholarly: "Etched onto the walls of this building are the words English philosopher John Locke said: 'Where law ends, tyranny begins.' And I see that."
He doesn't just see it; he embodies it.
Trump’s administration has pushed relentlessly to exercise emergency powers beyond the normal bounds of the law and to argue that his authority must be beyond review.
The last two weeks have revealed Trump’s chief legal strategy for the outlandish expansion of his own power. Wherever tenable—and in many instances where it isn’t—Trump’s preferred gambit is to argue that he needs outsized and, in any other setting, unconstitutional authority due to emergency circumstances or extreme risks to national security. He aims to leverage legal theory that provides, at least in the minds of certain conservative thinkers, a license for otherwise unconstitutional conduct and, most importantly, a suspension of the normal assumption of judicial review.
https://harrylitman.substack.com/p/where-law-ends-trump-begins