Title: The President and the Supreme Court's Temporary Deportation Rebuke

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Thanks to Amina Cerna, Brigid Bergin, and Tiffany Hansen for filling in last week. Eye procedures accomplished. I can now see without glasses for the first time since I was about 12 years old. Did you know the sky was blue? Like it's really, really blue. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but poof. Now we'll talk later in the show about the death of Pope Francis, of course, with open phones for any of you who are grieving as Catholics who had been affected by him, or with any other thoughts.

We'll also take calls on whether the world situation came up at your Easter services yesterday, if you are any kind of churchgoing Christian, and we'll hear from our transportation reporter, Stephen Nessen, today about the Trump administration taking control away from the MTA for the renovation of Penn Station. That article is called "Trump Station?" on Gothamist. So far, Governor Hochul likes the idea, but we have questions.

We'll do two segments today about the rule of law. We'll talk to a law professor, former dean of the Yale Law School, former State Department official, Harold Koh, about the fundamental threat to democracy of Trump barring selected law firms from doing business with the federal government. One version of an article on this that I read said even anyone who has hired those law firms, I guess, for things unrelated to Trump, but we will find out if it goes actually that far.

That'll be our second Rule of Law segment today. We will begin with this one. There was some kind of middle-of-the-night drama involving the Supreme Court on Friday night. Maybe you've heard at least the basics. Journalists are still piecing together exactly what the sequence of events was, but there was apparently some kind of simultaneous or almost simultaneous movement of buses carrying more migrants to be deported to El Salvador, and the justices considering whether to order those buses to turn around.

At one o'clock in the morning, one o'clock Saturday morning, the Supreme Court, by a striking 7 to 2 majority vote, this Supreme Court at 7 to 2, ordered a temporary halt to that kind of deportation, and apparently, the Trump administration obeyed the ruling. It shows the moment we're living in, right? That abiding by a Supreme Court ruling or not was even a question people were holding their breath about.

We'll start there on that high drama from the High Court and talk more broadly about aspects of the rule of law in the United States, hanging by a thread, as so many people see it. Our guest for this is Quinta Jurecic, whose Atlantic Magazine bio page says she's a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, and a senior editor at Lawfare.

I'll add that she's also active on Bluesky, aggregating information about democracy, the rule of law, and the Internet, and she was very active on this topic this weekend. Quinta, always good to have you, and so glad you could join us about this. Welcome back to WNYC.

Quinta Jurecic: Thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Could you explain to our listeners, who were not news junkies enough to spend Easter weekend following this, what the supreme court ruled at 1:00 AM Friday night, Saturday morning.

Quinta Jurecic: As you say, this was a bit of late-night drama. What happened essentially was that we learned on Friday, thanks to some filings from the ACLU, that the government was attempting to remove another group of Venezuelan detainees who are being held in immigration detention in Texas to the Salvadoran prison that's called CECOT, the Center for Terrorism Confinement, that the administration has been trying to sort of use as this sort of black hole, really, holding pen to send people under this declaration that this Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, constitutes an invading force under the Alien Enemies Act.

The administration has essentially asserted that these Venezuelans are members of this gang and that, therefore, it can remove them with very little process. Now, I think it's worth noting, it's not clear at all whether or not Tren de Aragua fits the qualifications for invoking this authority, and it's far from clear that any of these individuals are even members of that gang, but this is what the administration is claiming.

What happened is that the ACLU sort of had a flurry of court filings on Friday, saying, "We believe that these individuals are going to be removed to this really horrific prison in El Salvador. We're concerned that if they are removed that we will have no way of getting them back." Your listeners may well be familiar with the situation of the other people who have been incarcerated in El Salvador for, I believe, about a month now, under the same authority, ostensibly.

The ACLU had gone to court in Texas to try to get a judge to stop this and had not succeeded. They then tried, sort of, through a different route in a different court in Washington, DC, to try to at least get the judge to require the administration to provide 30 days of notice before removing these people, so that would have prevented the immediate removal on Friday or over the weekend. That judge, unfortunately, said that he was sympathetic to the ACLU, but just didn't feel like he had any authority over the case because he was in DC, and these folks were in Texas.

The ACLU then filed a flurry of other court filings in front of the Appeals Court, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and the Supreme Court at the same time. The Fifth Circuit declined to step in, and then at around, as you say, 1:00 in the morning, we got this notice from the Supreme Court saying that the administration needed to stop and that it could not remove any of these individuals before the Supreme Court stepped in.

As you say, it was a 7 to 2 ruling. Justice Thomas and Justice Alito were dissenting. I think this was a pretty astonishing chain of events. The court really stepped in at absolutely the last minute here, and it was far from clear that it would do so. I will say, certainly, when I woke up on Saturday morning, this was not the news that I expected to see. I had fully expected the court to allow these removals to go forward, so it's a really striking piece of news.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and what a movie drama kind of ending. It's almost like Casablanca or something. On the 7 to 2 ruling, including all three justices appointed by Trump, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Coney Barrett ruling against him, as you say, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito dissented, does that 7 to 2 ruling, given the makeup of this court, suggest to you anything larger than the specific issue at hand for the preservation of the rule of law during the Trump administration?

Quinta Jurecic: It's a bit early to say, and I don't want to say anything with too much confidence because there's so much that is in flux right now, but it does seem to me that it indicates perhaps dawning awareness on the part of a majority of the court, both the Liberals and, as you say, this sort of conservative bloc, including Chief Justice Roberts and the appointees that Trump himself made, that this is really not an administration whose assertions it can trust.

This is not an administration that can be assumed to behave in the way that normal administrations would. I think it's noteworthy that exactly this court had ruled a few weeks previously in a way that allowed the people who were to be removed under the Alien Enemies Act to challenge those detentions and removals, but really limited the route by which they could make those challenges.

That ruling had suggested to me that perhaps the court was concerned by the arguments that the administration was making, but still willing to kind of give it some wiggle room in a way that courts often give to the executive branch when it comes to matters of immigration, security, foreign affairs. This middle-of-the-night 7-2 ruling, I think, suggests that a majority of the court is no longer maybe inclined to give the administration that much room to run, that perhaps they really see that this is an administration that is pushing as far as it can possibly go, and they're inclined to perhaps keep it on a bit of a shorter leash.

Brian Lehrer: Politico wrote, "The ruling from the Supreme Court was astonishing, coming in the early morning Saturday, mere hours after a challenge was filed by attorneys representing the migrants. It came so quickly that some lower courts had not yet ruled, and the government had not even submitted a response to the Supreme Court, and so fast that Alito's statement dissenting from the decision was only noted as to follow, having still not yet been released as of Saturday afternoon." You described some of this before, Quinta, but my question is, have you ever seen the majority of the court feel the need to apparently act with such urgency?

Quinta Jurecic: I can't think of a comparable instance. That doesn't mean that there isn't one out there. The history of the court is very long. For listeners who are interested in more detail here, I'd really recommend the blog of Steve Vladeck, who's a professor at Georgetown and a sort of expert on the court and its history, and if there's a comparable instance, he would know. I think that it's fair to say that this is the court operating at rocket speed.

As you say, the fact that it stepped in before other courts had clearly ruled, before the government had even filed its response, that it didn't wait for Justice Alito himself to actually file his dissent, which showed up maybe 12 hours later, is really a sign of the level of urgency here. I think, again, it points to the extent to which the court just may no longer trust the administration.

What I mean by that is that during this hearing on Friday, where the ACLU was trying to get the judge in DC to at least delay these removals, the lawyer for the government, Drew Ensign, kept saying there's no flights planned for Friday, but would not commit to anything in terms of Saturday or Sunday, kept saying he wasn't aware there was a little more wiggle room, and when both the judge and the ACLU voiced concern that no flights planned on Friday could mean a flight takes off at 12:01 on Saturday morning, Ensign had nothing to say in response. I think that that early morning response by the court may indicate that the justices were genuinely concerned that the administration might have tried to ferry people off in the middle of the night.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, I'm imagining the justices, who don't probably have to ever work on this kind of schedule, maybe being woken up from their sleep and scrambling to their computers to get an order out the door and to the President's aides, as the clock was ticking down to the departure of the deportation plane. The buses did get stopped and turned around. Do we learn from this that Trump, at least for now, will follow a direct order of the United States Supreme Court, a third of whom he appointed?

Quinta Jurecic: That's an excellent point. I think what we have seen is that, as you say, the administration has adopted a very confrontational approach toward the courts. Of course, a few months ago, Vice President J.D. Vance had sort of hinted on Twitter that perhaps the executive might outright defy the courts. What I think we have seen is that in this case of these Venezuelan individuals who have been rendered, really, to the Sonoran prison, the administration has adopted a posture of real defiance when it comes to courts' orders to engage in the work of getting these people back.

That includes getting back Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was taken there by mistake, and that they've really, really pushed back against courts, telling them that they need to do the work to really return these individuals, but as you say, in instances where courts have put a block on their ability to remove people in the first place, I do not believe we have seen any instances of outright defiance.

This is not the first instance in which a court has said, "You can't remove this group of individuals to El Salvador after a court challenge was filed." This is just the first one the Supreme Court has gotten immediately involved in, and I don't believe there have been any individuals who have been removed over a court order after that initial group. As you say about the bus turning around, you may have this in mind, but for listeners who aren't familiar, reporting from NBC indicates there was literally a bus that turned around that was removing detainees from the detention center, and at some point on Friday night, did a U-turn and went back.

The administration clearly feels some level of comfort and really sort of posturing defiance in refusal to bring people back, but so far, again, after that first initial group of individuals who were removed in the middle of a court hearing where the ACLU was seeking to block their removal, this was in March, the administration has not, as far as I know, pushed outright in defiance of a court order to take people out of the country.

Brian Lehrer: I'm glad you used the word "rendition" a minute ago, because I wanted to ask you anyway, should we even call this program deportation or maybe something more like what some listeners may remember from the George W. Bush post 9/11 days, extraordinary rendition, which Wikipedia describes as a euphemistically named policy of state-sponsored abduction in a foreign jurisdiction and transfer to a third state?

It says, "best-known use of extraordinary rendition is in a United States-led program during the War on Terror, which circumvented the source country's laws on interrogation, detention, extradition, and/or torture." Of course, in this case, even if Wikipedia, which sometimes is not 100% right on the facts, but even assuming they got that right in this case, they would be circumventing our own country's laws, not a third country's laws on interrogation, detention and extradition, or torture. Would you use that label, extraordinary rendition, to describe what Trump and company have been doing or trying to do in these cases?

Quinta Jurecic: I think I'm comfortable using that term, and the reason why is, as you say, most of the time when we defer to deportation in the US, we're referring to a specific legal process through which people go through a procedure in front of an immigration judge, or sometimes there are more expedited procedures and are removed. This is something completely different. It's not only that the administration is seeking to remove these individuals under an extremely ambiguous legal authority, that I think really does not provide them with the authority that they're claiming.

It's that they're doing it without any regard for process, even the sort of minimal constraints that the Supreme Court initially placed on them after that first ruling, and that they're sending these individuals to a prison, as you say, in a third country in El Salvador that Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has trumpeted as a prison where no one will ever leave. This facility, CECOT, has absolutely horrific conditions.

Everything we know about it is deeply, deeply disturbing, and I think there is real concern that these people who were placed there over a court order may never be able to leave. Certainly, it is a bit of a rhetorical flourish, perhaps, to use the term "rendition," but I'm using it here to emphasize how flatly illegal this is and to really underline the extent to which the administration is flouting the rule of law.

Brian Lehrer: Our guest is Quinta Jurecic from Lawfare, from The Atlantic, from the Brookings Institution, as we talk about not only extraordinary rendition, but this extraordinary ruling in the middle of the night from the Supreme Court, Friday night, Saturday morning, apparently per that NBC report that Quinta cited, I saw the same one, required buses that were on the way to the airport with other deportees or renditionees to actually stop and turn around.

We'll take phone calls in a bit. Hold them for a minute. I'm going to ask a certain kind of question or put out a certain kind of invitation to you, but on what we were just talking about, Quinta, a listener texts, "Isn't there a legal issue between removing people without due process and deporting them to a foreign prison?" I never hear any discussion of what power allows Trump to put them in a prison likely forever, and as you say, in a foreign country.

Quinta Jurecic: It's extremely ambiguous, and the administration has kept it that way. We know there is some reporting on the existence of an agreement between the US and El Salvador, where the US is paying El Salvador some amount of money, I think it's unclear how much money. Senator Chris Van Hollen, who recently traveled to El Salvador to meet with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who's being detained there, said that he was informed it was about $15 million, but we don't know anything about the specifics of that agreement.

That really matters because it may have really serious implications for whether the people who are detained there are able to seek relief in US courts for their detention if they can argue that they're sort of effectively being held by the United States. Excuse me, as El Salvador has been kind of suggesting, "Oh, we're holding these individuals on behalf of the US," the US government has, on the other hand, kind of been saying, "Well, we can't possibly release these individuals. They're in the custody of El Salvador, which is a foreign government. We don't have any control." You can see how that is a very sort of canny way of trying to effectively create-

Brian Lehrer: A loophole.

Quinta Jurecic: -a legal black hole, essentially. Yes, exactly, where these individuals just can't get out.

Brian Lehrer: Is there a cruel and unusual punishment aspect to this? I haven't heard anybody bring this up, but one of the things in the Bill of Rights is no cruel or unusual punishment, and certain kinds of punishment have been declared unconstitutional within the United States. In this case, Bukele boasts about how cruel and unusual these prisons are, CECOT in particular, and probably other facilities there. Trump has kind of leaned in to how tough it's going to be for the deportees once they get sent there. Is there a cruel and unusual punishment constitutional challenge, in addition to the other legal challenges, that's possible here?

Quinta Jurecic: It's an interesting question, and as you say, we haven't seen it yet. I believe that that is in part because of the specific route through which these individuals have been given by the Supreme Court to challenge their detention through the route of habeas corpus. There's a lot of uncertainty about what specific rights apply in these instances where people are being held overseas.

In the Guantanamo context, for example, a lot of these cases are really drawing on the jurisprudence that comes out of Guantanamo. We've established very conclusively, over the course of the War on Terror, that individuals who are held in Guantanamo have the right to habeas corpus and some level of due-process right, but it's not clear what other constitutional rights apply. I think that that may be the reason why you haven't seen that claim here is that it's actually not clear. Now, certainly, if the administration were to try to remove American citizens to El Salvador, as President Trump has hinted, I imagine that you would see that claim potentially put forward in advance of any removal along those lines.

Brian Lehrer: The Politico article I cited continues, "The Justice Department submitted a response after the Supreme Court ruling to what it called an unprecedented injunction from the High Court." It says the DOJ emphasized that an appeals court early Saturday morning rejected a motion from the ACLU as premature and that the group of immigrants in North Texas had not yet been certified as a class, so I guess that's standing to be in court or something like that.

It continues, "The response penned by Trump's Solicitor General, D. John Sauer, asked the court to, at a minimum, clarify that its order does not preclude the administration from deporting the Venezuelan detainees in Texas under other authorities beyond the Alien Enemies Act." That might sound very legalistic-in-the-weeds to a lot of the listeners, but it may also be important. Do you understand what Trump is asking the Supreme Court to clarify now and allow him to do?

Quinta Jurecic: Absolutely, and this is actually something that has been pretty clear from the beginning. If you look at the ACLU's brief, they actually say, "No, you can go right ahead and do that." The issue here has to do with the specific authority under which the administration is removing people. Usually, when you are placed in immigration proceedings, you can be removed from the United States when you have what's called a final order of removal.

An immigration judge has said, "You're going to be taken out of the United States." That requires some level of process that you need to go through, and that takes time, and that's what the administration doesn't want to do. They don't want all of these people to have to go through the normal process. Using the Alien Enemies Act is essentially a way to short-circuit that and just say, "We're going to spirit all of these people out of here. We don't have to wait for them to go through any kind of process. We can just remove them right off the bat."

Importantly, that means that there's no individualized determination. A lot of these individuals, they have asylum claims, right? They have various kinds of claims that might be able to keep them in the country, as opposed to these Alien Enemies Act removals, which are just removing huge tranches of people by saying, "Well, we think that you're a member of Tren de Aragua on very shaky evidence, so now you're gone."

What the ACLU is saying here and what the administration is, they're agreeing on this, is that there is no bar on the administration removing individuals out of the US, potentially to El Salvador, under different authorities. Specifically, the problem here is the Alien Enemies Act, and that's because it really short-circuits the process that people would normally receive.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and it's supposed to be used against people here to attack the United States on behalf of another government. It's a wartime act. That's why it's called the Alien Enemies Act. I guess Trump might also have to demonstrate, tell me if I'm wrong, that his claim that these members, alleged members of Venezuelan gangs, are being sent here by the government of Venezuela to destabilize the United States. Will he have to demonstrate that in court in order to do anything under the Alien Enemies Act?

Quinta Jurecic: We're in this strange circumstance right now where in part because of the Supreme Court's insistence that individuals have to address this issue through habeas corpus claims on a more individualized basis, that the administration is trying to remove people, even though it's not at all clear that they actually have the authority to use the statute to carry out those removals.

What you would see potentially is once these cases get in front of a court, and there are a number of these cases around the country, that judges would then be able to kind of attack the core of this question of "Does the Alien Enemies Act even apply to this gang that is ostensibly carrying out some kind of an invasion on very thin evidence?" We haven't gotten to that point yet. I do think it is worth noting that the ACLU is actually now asking the Supreme Court, now that it's already weighed in, to take up the core of that claim. I don't really have a sense of whether the court might be interested in taking that route, but if it does, it means that we could potentially get the highest court to actually address that central issue.

Brian Lehrer: All right. When we come back from a short break, we're going to pull back the lens and talk about this extraordinary Supreme Court, middle-of-the-night, middle-of-the-weekend ruling. Look at it in the context of the state of democracy or the possible drift toward authoritarianism generally in the United States right now. We will include one of my thoughts about the particular protests that took place this weekend around the country and what their theme was.

Then we'll open up the phones to you for questions, comments, or stories as well. 212-433-WNYC call or text as we continue with Quinta Jurecic from Lawfare, The Atlantic, and the Brookings Institution. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC with the very active Quinta Jurecic, who's writing for Lawfare, for The Atlantic, for the Brookings Institution. A couple of her relevant Atlantic articles from just recently, one called "What, Exactly, Is the Supreme Court Thinking?" Another one, "What Recourse Does the Supreme Court Actually Have?" How about the headline of that one, Quinta? What recourse does the Supreme Court actually have, were Trump to defy it?

Quinta Jurecic: The courts are really in a difficult position here because the sort of classic line is that the courts don't have an army, right? They are dependent on people accepting their authority in order to actually hold that authority. There's a sort of magic trick that's going on. The judge can tell you what to do as long as you let them hold that authority. What we have seen in recent weeks in the lower courts and district courts is some judges, in cases that are related to the individuals who have been taken to the Salvadoran prison, actually moving toward wielding contempt of court against the administration, which is kind of the biggest tool that judges have in the box to really ensure that the administration does what they say.

Brian Lehrer: Then Trump says, "Meh, I have contempt for you."

Quinta Jurecic: [laughs] Exactly. It's hard to say because the process hasn't yet borne out. What we have seen is, in both of these instances, judges really trying to narrow down who specifically the individual is who is responsible for the administration not obeying a court order. The first court order that's at issue here is that order that I'd mentioned earlier from the DC judge, Judge Boasberg, to prevent planes from flying from the US to El Salvador to remove that first group of detainees.

Then the second case has to do, again, with the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, where the judge there wants to know why the administration has not been following her orders to take steps to bring this man back. In both of those cases, the judges have sort of been laying out the path to get more information about what specifically is going on here within the government so they can figure out what to do, and if all goes according to plan, what you might see is that they would then proceed with a contempt finding.

You could see criminal contempt, so that is actually prosecuted as a criminal case against the individual responsible. You could see civil contempt, which is more forward-looking. It's an attempt to punish someone until they do, essentially, what the judge is asking them to do, but as you say, you end up there with this kind of ultimate question of, "Okay, well, what happens if the court says, 'Put this person in jail, seize money,' that kind of thing, and then the administration says, 'We don't want to'?" The issue there is that the US Marshals, which are sort of the enforcement arm of the judiciary, they're not actually under the control of the judiciary. Ultimately, they report to the Attorney General, so you can tell--

Brian Lehrer: Oh, great.

[laughter]

Quinta Jurecic: Yes, so you can tell a story here that's really concerning where a court says, "Take this person into custody," the Attorney General says, "Don't do that," and then you kind of end up with a crisis. I would say there are answers to these questions. It may be that in some instances, courts actually have the authority to deputize other individuals to carry out those orders.

I think what I would say is that at that point, it is pretty clear that we're in a situation of profound constitutional crisis, and what matters is less what the technical authorities of the court happen to be and more whether Americans as a whole and Congress, if it wakes up from its slumber, care enough about this to actually stand up and reject what the administration is doing. At that point, it really becomes a political issue.

Brian Lehrer: I know you got to go in five minutes, and I really wanted to spend like half our time talking about what I'm about to bring up, but the details of the case from Friday night and these spurs off of that have been so interesting and important that we spent most of our time on those, but I want to pull back a step because the legal journalist and former US Attorney in Alabama, Joyce Vance, wrote this this weekend.

"The Trump administration wants a confrontation with the courts. Trump wants to try to break them. That's an essential path forward for a dictator. Like Trump's new buddy, Bukele, whose government removed all of the Supreme Court justices in El Salvador when they stood in his way and replaced them with more compliant ones, or in Hungary, under Viktor Orban, where the independence of the judiciary has been seriously compromised."

She wrote, "It's time for people to stop pretending that it isn't happening. Trump is trying to break the government. To control all its levers, he needs a complicit judiciary to go along with a complacent Congress." I always try in these cases, and listeners certainly justifiably bark when I don't, besides talking about the individual issues, whatever they are, from whatever realm of the Trump administration, to continually bring it back to the question of authoritarianism. How much, like Joyce Vance put it, would you put what the big picture is of what's going on right now in this country? She wrote, "That's an essential path forward for a dictator."

Quinta Jurecic: It certainly does seem to be what Trump is trying to do. I think that's a very different issue from whether or not he will be successful, and there are a lot of ways in which the administration's attack on the courts has been exceedingly clumsy. It has engendered increased opposition within the judiciary itself. I think that there is reason to think that Americans are increasingly concerned about these issues.

You see protests raising the question of what's going to happen to these people in El Salvador, what's going to happen to Kilmar Abrego Garcia? Certainly, that is the direction the administration is trying to go. I think the question is really whether the courts, the political system, the public will let them.

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned the protests. I said before the break, I wanted to share a thought about the protests that I had. I thought they took an interesting and maybe very important thematic turn this weekend. The ones two weekends ago, the big ones, these were a little smaller yesterday, though. It depends where you were, but two weekends ago, they were built around a theme of "Hands Off," and everyone could choose their issue.

We did a call-in for people who participated. "Hands Off what? Fill in the blank for you." "Hands Off My Medicaid. Hands Off My Science Funding," whatever. This time it was, to my eye, on a more centralized theme. The theme was "No Kings." They said, "No Kings Then. No Kings Now." I think that's important because it goes beyond the weeds of specific issues, important as they all are, to the overarching issue that underlies so many of them: the threat of an authoritarian takeover. I'm curious if you noticed the "No Kings" theme or have a reaction to it like I did.

Quinta Jurecic: I was thinking about the "No Kings" issue, in fact, because it was the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere's Ride in Massachusetts, and I saw pictures of people waiting along the route holding signs saying, "No Kings," and I do think that there's something really interesting there to the extent that this sort of civic impulse is able to connect back to the founding myths of the country and the ideas and idealism that motivated the framers and that that's potentially a really powerful thing. I'll be interested to see where that goes, not only in the months ahead, but as we draw closer and closer to the 250th anniversary of 1776.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, next year. All right, let me sneak in one caller for you, because I will say that half the calls on our board and a lot of the texts we're getting are asking the same essential question. Joe in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, you get to represent the group, and to respect Quinta's time, I have to ask you to do it in 20 seconds.

Joe: All right. Okay. That's going to be hard. I'm a former lawyer. I guess the point that I want to make is that all these aphorisms keep jumping through my mind, and you sort of touched on it in the recent conversation. To my thinking, all the things that the Trump administration is doing, taken individually, sure, they can be litigated through the courts, but that takes forever, and what we really need is an articulation and an action in Congress. Congress is a coequal branch of government, and Congress and Congress alone has the right to determine what constitutes high crimes and misdemeanors.

Brian Lehrer: There you go, half the people calling and texting right now, Quinta, are bringing up high crimes and misdemeanors. The I word, "impeachment." Should we not even go there? Because the numbers just are not there in the Senate, and they tried twice during the first Trump term when he did what many people considered egregious things. Is it even worth talking about impeachment?

Quinta Jurecic: I think that it is absolutely worth keeping Congress in our minds and putting pressure on Congress to act, as the caller said, as a coordinate branch of government, as a branch of government that has its own constitutional obligations to uphold our democratic system. Currently, Republicans who are in control of Congress have really allowed themselves to just not take up that role at all, to sort of hand it over to the courts.

I think a lot of the tensions and frustrations that we've talked through over the course of this conversation are a side effect of courts kind of acting as this pressure release valve for political pressure that is really best expressed through Congress. Certainly, I agree that in the immediate term, is impeachment a realistic expectation? Certainly not, but I do think that we should absolutely keep the focus on Congress, keep in mind that Congress has an equal constitutional obligation here, and that to the extent that the Constitution provides a set of solutions to the crisis that we are currently in, those solutions are impeachment and removal, and it is certainly worth keeping that at front of mind and pushing members of Congress to attend to their constitutional duties.

Brian Lehrer: Quinta Jurecic, you can read her in The Atlantic. You can read her on Lawfare. You can read her from Brookings Institution's stuff. Thank you for giving us so much time and so many insights this morning. We really appreciate it.

Quinta Jurecic: Thank you for having me.

 

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