A Federal Judge Shows How the Courts Should Deal With Trump’s Lies
District Court Judge Karin Immergut’s opinion shows that courage in judging doesn’t require rhetoric or defiance—only the quiet insistence that facts still matter.
Immergut, a Trump appointee, faced the recurring judicial dilemma of the Trump era: how to deal with a president who lies about the conditions that he claims justify granting him extraordinary power. Trump has been prodigal in invoking “emergencies”—at the border, in cities, even in cyberspace—but nearly all have rested on transparent falsehoods. There has never been an “invasion” of marauding immigrants, or a fentanyl “siege,” or a crime wave in Washington sufficient to justify federal deployment. Each supposed emergency has been a pretext for asserting powers Congress never gave him. The pattern is as consistent as it is brazen: declare a crisis, invent the facts to match, and dare the courts to stop him.
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Immergut inherited that fuzzy command and met it with clarity, modesty, and backbone. Her opinion is a model of calm judicial courage.
First, she dismantled the factual predicate. The record, she wrote, showed that protests at the Portland ICE facility were “not significantly violent or disruptive.” They were small, scattered, and far from the “rebellion” Trump described. Oregon’s Tenth Amendment and statutory claims succeeded because, on any fair reading, Trump’s actions had no legal or factual foundation.
more:
http://newrepublic.com/article/201377/oregon-national-guard-federal-judge-trump-lies
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