By Kim Wehle\Zeteo
Photos: YouTube Screenshots\Wikimedia Commons
The unraveling of the rule of law in the United States is almost complete. Not only is there evidence indicating that Department of Justice officials lied to a federal judge, floated saying “fuck you” to court orders, and fired a star DOJ lawyer for refusing to play along, but the far-right majority of the Supreme Court – in a ruling that has been widely distorted as mere procedural housekeeping – just effectively suspended the Constitution’s limits for presidents.
If this seems hyperbolic, please read on.
Let’s start with Trump v. CASA, in which a 6-3 majority technically held that so-called “[u]niversal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts.” The justices accordingly granted a “partial stay” of three injunctions entered by lower courts that had halted Trump’s executive order attempting to outmaneuver the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship by birth. The Court took up the issue of universal injunctions in this particular case gratuitously – on an allegedly “emergency” basis after its traditional term had already ended, the theory being that the Trump administration would suffer “irreparable harm” in not being able to deny birthright citizenship in the interim.
Although the decision is roundly being touted as narrow and discrete, the exact opposite is the case.
The majority gave Trump his biggest win since it manufactured criminal immunity for him last summer in Trump v. United States. Moving forward, Trump can feel free to issue policies that violate the Constitution without worrying a fig about lower federal courts stopping him because under the CASA decision, they can now only issue orders benefiting the named plaintiffs in particular. What this means is that anyone whose rights have been violated must now find their own lawyer (assuming they have the financial means to do so), file their own separate lawsuit, and secure a separate injunction against Trump in order for the Constitution to have any bite. In the meantime, he is free to violate it against everyone else until they get their own court decision stopping him from picking on them.
The majority reasoned that the “victim” in Trump’s birthright citizenship is Donald Trump – not the citizens affected by his executive order – because the lower courts dared to stop his official policy of overriding the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Justice Sonia Sotomayor explained in her dissenting opinion:
“Suppose an executive order barred women from receiving unemployment benefits or black citizens from voting. Is the Government irreparably harmed, and entitled to emergency relief, by a district court order universally enjoining such policies? The majority, apparently, would say yes.”
The implications of the decision go far beyond birthright citizenship, potentially affecting anyone in America that crosses Donald Trump. Consider the frightening picture that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson painted in her separate dissent:
“Imagine an Executive who issues a blanket order that is blatantly unconstitutional—demanding, say, that any and all of its political foes be summarily and indefinitely incarcerated in a prison outside the jurisdiction of the United States, without any hearing or chance to be heard in court. Shortly after learning of this edict, one such political rival rushes into court with his lawyer, claims the Executive’s order violates the Constitution, and secures an injunction that prohibits the Executive from enforcing that unconstitutional mandate. The upshot of today’s decision is that, despite the rival’s success in persuading a judge of the unconstitutional nature of the Executive’s proclamation, the court’s ruling and injunction can only require the Executive to shelve any no-process incarceration plan that targets that particular individual (the named plaintiff); the Executive can keep right on rounding up its other foes, despite the court’s clear and unequivocal pronouncement that the executive order is unlawful.”
Coverage of the CASA decision has mostly overlooked its tolerance of presidential lawlessness, as universal injunctions have plagued presidents for decades. It is true that the majority left room for state governments to secure medium-sized injunctions and for plaintiffs to try and get wider injunctions via cumbersome class action lawsuits (a federal district judge in Washington, DC, just took up the Court’s invitation and certified a class action, issuing an injunction against Trump’s restrictions on asylum applications). But such caveats – which the same majority could eventually shut down too – are unlikely to give the Trump administration serious pause before continuing to violate the Constitution at this point in his second term.
‘Fuck You’ to the Courts?
Worse still is the halting fact that the justices’ decision dovetails with evidence of the Trump administration’s knowing contempt for the authority of the federal courts and the rule of law. On June 24, DOJ whistleblower Erez Reuveni sent a 35-page letter to Congress and oversight officials following his firing from the position of acting deputy director for DOJ’s Office of Immigration Litigation.
Reuveni was terminated for allegedly failing to “zealously advocate” on behalf of the United States and for arguing “against Homeland Security and [the] State Department” when he told a federal judge at an April 4 hearing that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was erroneously removed to CECOT prison in El Salvador. (The government has since returned Abrego Garcia to the United States following the Supreme Court’s confirmation that he was “improperly sent to El Salvador.”)
On March 14, 2025, the day Reuveni received notice of his promotion to the acting deputy director position, he was summoned to a meeting of DOJ officials that included Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, who is also a nominee for a federal judgeship on the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. The meeting occurred in the wake of news reports that Trump planned to sign a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act to summarily remove people from the United States. According to Reuveni, Bove indicated at the meeting that planes containing people would be taking off over the weekend “no matter what,” and that if a judge ordered the removals stopped, “DOJ would need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you’ and ignore any such court order.” Bove’s comments left Reuveni and others “stunned.”
Over the next three weeks, Reuveni reportedly “directly witnessed and reported” officials at DOJ “ignoring court orders,” “presenting ‘legal’ arguments with no basis in law,” “misrepresenting facts presented before courts,” and directing him “to misrepresent facts in one of these cases in violation of [his] legal and ethical duties as an officer of a court.” By Reuveni’s account, his “internal reporting and ultimately his refusal to obey this illegal order directly resulted in his suspension and termination.”
For his part, Bove told a Senate committee last week: “I have never advised a Department of Justice attorney to violate a court order.”
Everyone Is at Risk
It’s difficult to overstate the seriousness of this pair of stories. If the Justice Department’s top brass is indeed hellbent on flouting the law, lying to judges and ignoring court orders, and retaliating against lawyers who abide by their legal and ethical obligations to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law, then Congress must act. In a world in which government officials cared about ethics and the rule of law, that would mean investigating possible impeachment of the president and top officials and enacting legislation to make clear that the federal courts have the power to issue orders that can effectively ensure that the Executive Branch fully complies with the rule of law.
The rule of law is pivotal to a functioning democracy because it means that everyone – including presidents – are bound by legal authorities designed to disincentivize bad behavior. Human beings, if given power, are prone to amass more, entrench it, and ultimately abuse it. James Madison understood this, famously writing in Federalist No. 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Without a serious means of enforcing the Constitution, it amounts to nothing but a scrap of paper.
Meanwhile, those in America who are courageous enough to seriously pay attention are left to hope that Trump will at some point decide that he has enough power or that there are ethical lines he simply won’t cross. That, of course, is a fool’s errand. The people who voted for him did so because of his willingness to smash things – not because of the strength of his personal values. He has delivered for them.
To the millions who face no real threat of arrest and removal based on their immigration status, the details of the CASA ruling and Reuveni’s complaint probably seem far removed from daily life, which to a large extent is going on in the United States as if nothing really changed since January 20, 2025. That’s a grave mistake. Without an enforceable rule of law to stall unconstitutional behavior by the Executive Branch – which has unparalleled powers over criminal law enforcement and the military – nearly every single person within the boundaries of the United States is now at risk.
Kimberly Wehle, Zeteo’s legal contributor and author of ‘Constitution in Crisis,’ is a professor of law and Fulbright Scholar at Leiden University, The Netherlands.
