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Injustice for All is a weekly series about how the Trump administration is trying to weaponize the justice system—and the people who are fighting back.
JD Vance is pretty sure he knows the law better than the chief justice
Is there a more craven and unlikeable villain than former airport book bestselling author JD Vance?
Vance, whose legal career consisted of just under two years as a corporate lawyer after spending most of his law school career writing a book where he would trash his own family to catapult himself to fame, told The New York Times’ Ross Douthat this week that Chief Justice John Roberts just doesn’t understand what the judiciary does:
I think you are seeing an effort by the courts to quite literally overturn the will of the American people. To be clear, it’s not most courts. But I saw an interview with Chief Justice Roberts recently where he said the role of the court is to check the excesses of the executive. I thought that was a profoundly wrong sentiment. That’s one-half of his job. The other half of his job is to check the excesses of his own branch. You cannot have a country where the American people keep on electing immigration enforcement and the courts tell the American people they’re not allowed to have what they voted for. That’s where we are right now.
Good god, man. The Roberts court invented immunity for Donald Trump. The Roberts court is the reason you have a job. The Roberts court is wholly controlled by your allies. The executive is not exactly beleaguered here, you big baby.
But aside from Vance’s usual whining about how oppressed the Trump administration is, this is also spectacularly wrongheaded in terms of how separation of powers works.
Vance’s theory of governance seems to be the one that the administration as a whole has settled on: Because people elected Trump, they implicitly endorsed every future action Trump takes, so courts can’t rule otherwise. If they rule against the administration, goes the thinking, that violates the separation of powers.
Such a theory, of course, makes courts entirely unnecessary, which may actually be Vance’s goal. But while the republic still stands, or crawls, or whatever it is we’re doing right now, the literal job of the judiciary is to check the excesses of the other branches, and vice versa. Perhaps at fancy Yale Law School, they don’t cover basic separation of powers and government structure and skip right to letting you do an independent study where you write your airport book?
Trump races to the Supreme Court—again
Another week, another Trump trip to the nation’s highest court. This time, it’s to ask for an emergency injunction so that the administration isn’t even required to explain why Elon Musk’s illegal government-wrecking machine, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, isn’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
Yes, you’re reading that right. The government is fighting even having to explain why DOGE would fall under FOIA in response to a lawsuit from Citizens for Responsibility in Ethics in Washington.
Solicitor General John Sauer, yet another DOJ official who got his job because he was one of Trump’s myriad criminal defense attorneys, is trying to spin the fact that the lower court ordered very modest discovery into the structure of DOGE—basically, some depositions and some document production—as one of the most intrusive, appalling things imaginable. He told the court that giving CREW any information justifying his assertion DOGE is not subject to FOIA “offends the separation of powers by compromising the ‘necessity’ for confidentiality that allows presidential advisors to provide ‘candid, objective’ advice and communication.”
Buddy. They’re not asking that Musk cough up his private texts to Trump. They’re asking for you to provide factual support for your assertion as to how DOGE functions.
Also, perhaps you forgot that your pal Stephen Miller’s group America First is currently helming a lawsuit arguing for a vast expansion of FOIA when it comes to the judiciary branch. We’ll have to wait and see what the nation’s highest court thinks of this gambit, but let’s face it: We know Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas will be on board with whatever Trump wants.
Trump’s crypto criming is in full effect
What is the current price of dinner with the president? Well, it’s variable based on the price of his stupid crypto meme coin, but here’s how it breaks down: 220 people, many of whom are anonymous, bought $394 million of scammy crypto coins owned mainly by two Trump-affiliated private companies. Individual spend ranged from S55,000 to $37.7 million, averaging out at roughly $1.7 million per head.
Federal per-person campaign contributions are capped at $3,500, but everyone knows that only fools and toddlers care about that. Savvy folks know the move is just to bribe the president directly by investing in whatever scam he’s got going.
Never thought we’d long for the low-key days of everyone bribing Trump by spending a few thousand bucks at his D.C. hotel. Things used to be so innocent.
Ed Martin continues to be a far better bully than a lawyer
Last week, we learned that even this batch of Senate Republicans has some sort of limits, so Ed Martin did not get to be the United States Attorney for Washington, D.C. Instead, he gets to be pardon attorney, a job he is proving to understand exactly as well as he did that of interim U.S. attorney—which is to say, not at all.
Last week saw Martin explaining that the job of a pardon attorney was to review President Joe Biden’s pardons to see if they could be overturned, which is not a thing that can be done. This week, he may or may not still be the pardon attorney, but he also has a new gig: “captain” of the DOJ’s “Weaponization” group. In typical Martin fashion, he seems to have understood that to mean he was supposed to actively be weaponizing the DOJ. So his new focus is basically going to be harming people even if he doesn’t have enough to prosecute.
Related | Why Trump can't quit Ed Martin
“If they can be charged, we’ll charge them. But if they can’t be charged, we will name them,” he said. “And we will name them, and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed.”
His explanation? “That’s the way things work.”
A couple of notes, Ed. First, it’s “who are ashamed.” Next, is this really the purview of the pardons attorney? This must be under the Captain Weaponization role, perhaps. Finally, it’s literally not how things work. Kinda literally the opposite. You’ve just announced you’re using your prosecutor job (which is actually a pardon job?) to harass people when you don’t have evidence to charge them.
We know Martin’s past legal experience was reed-thin, but come on, man. This is basic stuff.
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