The appearance of the "bad boy" Donald Trump in the White House has worked as a litmus test of the claim that the U.S. is governed based on the rule of law.
Fired and ired by the loss of the presidential seat and the graft that accompanied it, the losing opponents of Donald Trump and his policies started "The Resistance".
Judges, prosecutors, attorneys general of states joined that "Resistance".
And, in view of "The Resistance", the law stopped mattering (or, more precisely, it has become more clear that the law never mattered in the first place).
Lawsuits by foreigners located outside of the U.S., as well as by people suing on their behalf - all of them lacking standing under U.S. statutory law and precedents of the U.S. Supreme Court - started to get sweeping court "victories" with nationwide judicial injunctions against the President forbidding him to exercise his discretionary powers.
Judges started to question the President - including in online direct debates, with access to the debates from any point in the world through the Internet - about bases of his national security decisions, while having no clearance to know those bases, and while such bases constituted a matter of national security.
Judges started to forbid the President to withdraw discretionary federal funding of states because states refused to comply and actively interfered with enforcement of federal statutory immigration law.
Judge Ruth Ginsburg of the U.S. Supreme Court who openly and viciously opposed Trump, expressed her personal animosity to him, and undertook an all-expenses-paid-by-an-antiTrump-litigant trip (who bribed her and her husband for all-expenses-paid vacations in Hawaii before) likely in order to fix a lower-court case against Trump, continues to stick like glue to cases where Trump is a party, refusing to recuse from those cases despite a letter from 50 senators based on her publicly expressed personal animosity towards the President, and makes decisions against Trump (see also here), and the press cheers her on as a "role model in troubled times".
Prominent constitutional law professors argue that the President does not have authority to give pardons, even though such authority is reflected in clear text of the U.S. Constitution (see those arguments here, here, here and here).
Illegal immigrants are marching in the streets protesting against a discretionary decision of the President to cancel a discretionary deferred deportation program illegally created by his predecessor over the head of the U.S. Congress - and sue the President, asking the court to make the President take bake the cancellation of his predecessor's discretionary order, even while the President asked the U.S. Congress to do its job and pass the law in that particular area.
In other words, illegitimate exercise discretion of one U.S. President to legislate in the area of immigration law through executive orders is cheered while the legitimate of another U.S. President to cancel that illegitimate legislation and ask the appropriate branch of the government to legislate in that area, is sneered and is the subject of lawsuits.
The Attorney General of the state which has bled a million people since 2010 because of high taxes and high corruption in the state, who is defending and uses enormous amounts of taxpayer funds on defense of violators of the U.S. Constitution and resists compensation to wrongfully convicted of crimes in his state, proudly announces that he turned his office into a "bastion of resistance" - to the U.S. President.
The American Bar Association that viciously - and unfairly - criticized Trump before his election as President for his protected by the 1st Amendment and fair criticism of a biased judge (see disqualifying information about Judge Curiel here and here), and that, due to that criticism, could not position itself as a "neutral expert" for nominations of judges by Trump, filibusters Trump's judicial nominees.
This surreal bacchanalia of lawlessness has, of course, nothing to do with the "rule of law", honor, ethics or professionalism of the legal profession, or the judiciary.
And then, the bad boy Trump threw yet another stick in the pond by undermining the cozy existence of the legal establishment, possibly showing that he would later go further and be open to the idea of supporting deregulation of the legal profession, at least where all federal judges must be state-licensed attorneys.
At this time, Trump made the first step in that direction.
What the ABA failed to consider while filibustering judicial nominees of the President is that the President's deferential consultations with the ABA for their "recommendations" and "seal of approval" of federal judicial nominees is not part of any laws.
It is a deferential practice started by President Eisenhower, which is not obligatory to any succeeding Presidents, including Donald Trump.
And President Trump ended that practice.
Of course, there is a lot of ire about the President snubbing the "venerable" attorney's association.
But, the President is the sole authority to nominate judges according to the U.S. Constitution, while the ABA that controls such nominations by its "qualified - not qualified" ratings, and controls access to justice of the entire country through the attorney monopoly, prohibition for people to pick their own court representatives and requirements that judges must be attorneys licensed by states (and graduates of an ABA-approved law school) has no place in the U.S. Constitution at all.
So - bravo, President Trump, on removing the lawyers' guild from nomination process of federal judges.
And - let's remove the lawyers' guild from control of the judiciary by removing the requirement that all federal judges be graduates from ABA-approved schools and be state-licensed (and state-controlled) attorneys.
That will be a start in the right direction - true separation of state and federal powers.
As the U.S. Constitution that every public attorney and every public official in this country is sworn to protect requires.
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