Cont’d
“… But, taken at face value, Mr. Trump’s statement on Saturday went much further [than DOJ invoking Unitary Executive theories], suggesting that even if what he is doing unambiguously breaks an otherwise valid law, that would not matter if he says his motive is to save the country.
There are a handful of instances of other presidents claiming the power to override legal limits, but those have usually been limited to national security.
In the early days of the Civil War, for example, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus rights, called up troops and otherwise spent money that Congress, which was not in session, had not appropriated.
When Congress reconvened, Lincoln
sent them a letter telling them what he had done and famously asking, “are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” He also said that what he had done, “whether strictly legal or not,” had been necessary, and Congress retroactively ratified his actions.
More than a century later, after President Richard Nixon resigned to avoid being impeached in the Watergate scandal, he
talked in an interview about wiretapping and other steps that might appear to be illegal but were undertaken to protect against foreign threats. Citing Lincoln’s example, Nixon said presidents have inherent power to authorize government officials to break laws if the president decides that doing so is in the national interest.
“When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal,” Nixon claimed.
…
Mr. Trump and some of his allies have pushed the political argument that the nation has been under siege from what they characterize as leftist policies and values, and has fallen into a spiral of decline that must be reversed by any means necessary.
Among them, Mr. Trump’s budget chief, Russell Vought, wrote an essay in 2022, declaring that the United States was already in a “post-Constitutional moment” and that to push back against liberals, it was necessary to be “radical in discarding or rethinking the legal paradigms that have confined our ability to return to the original Constitution.” “
