The Law Is Not Fully Trump’s Yet

Through the sometimes blinding storm of executive orders and memorandums in the opening days of President Trump’s new administration, one pattern is already becoming clear: This is not a crew particularly interested in law.

Within its first nine days, the administration declared it was freezing trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans — a move that at worst violates Article I of the Constitution, which gives Congress the power to decide how taxpayer dollars are spent, and at best violates Article II, which requires the president to ‘faithfully execute” the laws Congress passes.

Mr. Trump fired career officials, flouting laws designed to ensure that government employment is based on merit, not personal loyalty, and then busily began clearing the Department of Justice of career legal staff members so he could replace them with loyalists. And he issued an executive order claiming to eliminate automatic birthright citizenship, in defiance not just of the 14th Amendment but also of the foundational idea that citizens decide who should be a president, not the other way around.

Mr. Trump is hardly the first president to claim broad executive power. The difference this time is not only the enormity of his claims — a level of authoritarian aspiration that far exceeds any other in the modern American age. It’s that the administration hardly even bothers to try to craft legal justifications for its actions.

Many of its orders and memorandums so far are bafflingly vague and internally contradictory, some checkered with embarrassing errors, others largely devoid of references to law. These are not the strategic moves of a legal A team focused on insulating itself against judicial correction, or teeing up a model case to persuade the courts to move the law in a new direction. These seem more like the orders of a teamunconcerned with the risks of any legal challenge at all.

Is it true that the law poses no serious obstacle to the ambitions of the new administration’s leaders? Americans’ confidence in the Supreme Court is at a historical polling low, and a large majority say the Supreme Court is more motivated by politics than law. The left in particular seems prone to despair about whether the courts will slow our autocratic slide. But that despair is premature. The legal system is not so easily dismissed.