If you want a sobering Monday read, check out what conservative legal scholars are saying about Donald Trump and his ability to appropriately administer executive branch powers. After a week in which Trump questioned the ethics of both Mexican and Muslim judges for no other reason than their race/religion, even conservative scholars are at wit's end at the prospect of a Trump presidency. Adam Liptak reports:
David Post, a retired law professor who now writes for the Volokh Conspiracy, a conservative-leaning law blog, said those comments had crossed a line.
“This is how authoritarianism starts, with a president who does not respect the judiciary,” Mr. Post said. [...] “The president has all the power with respect to enforcing the law,” he said. “There’s only one of those three branches that actually has the guns in its hands, and that’s the executive.” [...]
Randy E. Barnett, a law professor at Georgetown and an architect of the first major challenge to President Obama’s health care law, said he had grave doubts on both fronts.
“You would like a president with some idea about constitutional limits on presidential powers, on congressional powers, on federal powers,” Professor Barnett said, “and I doubt he has any awareness of such limits.”
It's so bad, some are even admitting Trump would be worse than President Obama—and that's saying something, given that they've been crying "executive overreach" since the day Obama first set foot in the Oval Office.
Republican officials have criticized Mr. Obama for what they have called his unconstitutional expansion of executive power. But some legal scholars who share that view say the problem under a President Trump would be worse.
“I don’t think he cares about separation of powers at all,” said Richard Epstein, a fellow at the Hoover Institution who also teaches at New York University and the University of Chicago.
Let’s face it: Trump’s sense of justice begins and ends at the edges of his own sandbox. He’s judge and jury and whomever falls on the other side of his pointed finger is guilty. We already knew this, but seeing conservative scholars name it is at once validating and slightly horrifying. If they could’ve found anything good to say—anything at all—they would have.