The first confrontation between the Trumpenreich and the permanent government.

Well, it’s always possible that General Kelly has both private and public position. And Trump knows his private one.

well jim the thing is trump could do that the law is crystal clear the president has absolute authority over all immigration for any and all reasons he could send marines to the airports and no one could fault him.
but not only does he not do that he continues to allow chain migration, dreamers, H1B1, refugees, regular immigration, and all the rest. And all this while constantly reassuring the press they will love his immigration policies, and how we all love immigration. so you keep spinning your wold fantasies but the reality is he promised and could have stopped all immigration day one and has in fact done jack shit
meanwhile his administration thats not still obama operatives is full of GOP cucks and israeli intelligence opps. His entire platform is in the garbage can, and he doesnt even realize it because he never had the capability off seeing it as more than disconcerted bloviating

“When what he does stops leaking, and what the democrats do starts leaking, then it will be time.”

And if that day never comes? You keep insisting that Trump is just biding his time, laying the groundwork, and so on.

On Feb. 16th:
“Give him time. I predicted he would start to move around March or so. I would not get worried until some time in August.”

On Feb. 25th, in reply to me:
“I expect an escalating confrontation with the courts with Trump ignoring the courts, and the courts proclaiming him and his entire administration anathema, and attempting to do an impeachment from the bench, with Trump winning in October or November of 2017.

If he does not decisively settle matters with the courts before the mid term elections, then I will get worried.”
and the next day:
“As for the wall, I expect that ditches will be dug and concrete poured by 2017 May first, and that Trump will take a victory lap around a largely complete wall in the 2020 election.”

March 6th, on repealing and replacing Obamacare:
“Worrying, but early days yet.”

March 12 (on Ryancare):
“We have not seen Trump’s plan yet. It is not over till it is over.”

March 15th:
“They are not howling yet because they think it will come to nothing. Maybe they are right, but I think they are wrong. Howls will start in due course, around December or January.”

Yesterday:
“The time approaches”

So, when does it *stop* being “early days”, Jim, and start looking like the autocoup/purge/coronation isn’t going to happen? No concrete for The Wall in May? This August? The election this November? January 2018? Or, if 2020 rolls around and the swamp remains undrained, the courts not humbled, and the CIA still leaking in favor of blue empire, will you still be saying “just wait, God Emperor Trump’s plan will come to fruition any day now”?

“Shortly after Gorsuch is confirmed”

The same Gorsuch who reportedly called Trump’s criticism of the courts “disheartening” and “demoralizing”?

“”Judge Gorsuch and I actually talked about that,” [Sen. Ben] Sasse [R-Neb.] said on MSNBC Feb. 9. “And frankly he got pretty passionate about it. I asked him about the ‘so-called judges’ comment because we don’t have’ so-called judges’ or so-called presidents or so-called senators. And this is a guy who kind of welled up with some energy and he said any attack on any of, I think his term to me was brothers or sisters of the robe, is an attack on all judges. And he believes in an independent judiciary.”

Former Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., who is assisting Gorsuch in his Capitol Hill meetings, had a slightly different take. She said in a statement to NBC that Gorsuch said any attack on the judiciary is “disheartening” and “demoralizing” — speaking generally rather than responding directly to Trump’s recent comments.”

And recall that “Conservative” Supreme Court Justices, once confirmed, pretty much consistently move Left, as seen recently with Chief Justice “Obamacare both is and isn’t a tax” Roberts. To quote FiveThirtyEight,
“A typical justice nominated by a Republican president starts out at age 50 as an Antonin Scalia and retires at age 80 as an Anthony Kennedy. A justice nominated by a Democrat, however, is a lifelong Stephen Breyer.”
(https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/supreme-court-justices-get-more-liberal-as-they-get-older/)

Or how about the argument that Gorsuch could push the court *Leftward* (see https://www.damemagazine.com/2017/02/01/could-neil-gorsuch-make-supreme-court-move-left), essentially by causing “moderate swing vote” Anthony Kennedy to permanently side with the more lefty Justices in opposition, pointing to Kennedy’s recent siding with the (pro-abortion) left in the WWH v. Hellerstedt case?

And on the recent cases like the judge in Hawaii, let me point to Prof. Josh Blackman’s “When Judges Revolt” (http://joshblackman.com/blog/2017/03/16/when-judges-revolt/)
“Judges in Washington, Maryland, and Hawaii are signaling that they are not going to treat President Trump as if he were any other President. The sorts of analyses we’ve seen are absolutely insane under long-standing law.
But maybe I am wrong to assume precedent applies to Trump. In a must-read post, Ben Wittes and Quinta Jurecic assert that because courts think Trump is unable to follow his oath of office, the usual rules do not apply to him. We are witnessing, they note, a “revolt of the judges.””

From that Wittes and Jurecic piece (https://lawfareblog.com/revolt-judges-what-happens-when-judiciary-doesnt-trust-presidents-oath):
“It goes, not to put too fine a point on it, to the question of whether the judiciary means to actually treat Trump as a real president or, conversely, as some kind of accident—a person who somehow ended up in the office but is not quite the President of the United States in the sense that we would previously have recognized.”
And
“But also there is a third possibility, and we should be candid about it: Perhaps everything Blackman and Margulies and Bybee are saying is right as a matter of law in the regular order, but there’s an unexpressed legal principle functionally at work here: That President Trump is a crazy person whose oath of office large numbers of judges simply don’t trust and to whom, therefore, a whole lot of normal rules of judicial conduct do not apply.

In this scenario, the underlying law is not actually moving much, or moving or at all, but the normal rules of deference and presumption of regularity in presidential conduct—the rules that underlie norms like not looking behind a facially valid purpose for a visa issuance decision—simply don’t apply to Trump.”

As plenty across the political spectrum noted (even the likes of Dershowitz), much of the “reasoning” in the Hawaii decision is basically that actions that would’ve been constitutional if ordered by Obama are “unconstitutional” when ordered by Trump (because “animus”). Note that Wittes and Jurecic *approve* of this judicial revolt. Blackman, meanwhile, defends the “traditional judicial posture” — that the president is really the president — but, with regards to the Supreme Court, says “Tragically, I suspect my view will not prevail.”

As for Trump going Andrew Jackson on the Sumpreme Court after it sides against him (Gorsuch or no), well, we’ve already had the media laying the ground for the counterattack. Like, from The Atlantic last month (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/a-historical-precedent-for-trumps-attack-on-judges/516144/):
“In fact, Jackson, whose portrait hangs in Trump’s office, provides no historical support for Trump’s unprecedented personal assault on the motives of judges evaluating the constitutionality of his executive orders. Jackson criticized Marshall on constitutional, rather than political, terms, and he ultimately required Congress and the states to acknowledge the Supreme Court’s authority to interpret the Constitution, rather than threaten to disregard it.”

And at the WaPo (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/02/05/constitutional-crisis-what-happens-if-trump-decides-to-ignore-a-judge/):
“After the Supreme Court and Justice John Marshall struck down a Georgia law that allowed for the seizure of Native American lands, saying it violated federal treaties, Jackson ignored it or at least initially declined to get involved — depending upon the account. He is remembered to have said, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it,” though there is debate about the accuracy of that quote.”
And, after mentioning both Lincoln and Jefferson’s fights with the Court,
“If Trump were to ever go down this road, [Prof. Daniel P.] Franklin said, the ultimate arbiter would be the other branch of government. He said Trump could be held in contempt of court, and it would then be up to the House of Representatives.

“[Contempt of court], in my opinion, is a ‘high crime or misdemeanor’ in the meaning of the Constitution, and he would be subject to impeachment,” Franklin said. “Whether or not the House of Representatives would see it that way is another question. It is at that point their call.”

Before we got to that point, though, we’d likely see wrangling between the judge and not Trump but the government officials working beneath him, said Joel Nichols, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas.

“The key to whether court orders are going to be obeyed isn’t about what President Trump does, but about how the judges respond to noncompliance and whether other non-Trump players decide to obey their orders,” Nichols said.

A judge would have to issue a “show cause” order if officials didn’t seem to be obeying the order. If they still didn’t obey, they could be held in contempt, and federal marshals could be dispatched to force them to do so or face jail time — which could also constitute a crisis.”

Isn’t that pretty much the way I said the Left was likely to respond to Trump defying the liberal courts? That the courts would “encourage” the people of the executive branch to defy and disobey Trump, using the U.S. Marshals to make instructive examples if need be? And that the Media would pressure Congress, most notably the cuckservatives desperate for “respectability” (and being those “the crocodile eats last”, as it were), to use it as grounds for impeachment?

Frankly, I guess it comes down to being a lot more pessimistic about the possibility of any sort of Jacksonian defiance of the courts anymore; deference to the black robes has been ingrained too deeply for too long. I”m skeptical that there’s really any good way forward anymore, and have yet to see any good, solid evidence to dissuade me of that skepticism.

(Side note; the inability to do “blockquotes” for the longer quote passages is kind of a pain here.)