(Photo by Danielle E. Gaines/Maryland Matters)
Unprecedented. Authoritarian. An open assault to the rule of law. That’s what legal commentators across the political spectrum are calling it.
As a civil rights lawyer who has practiced in Maryland’s federal courts for more than 35 years, I will add ominous.
Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is crashing through yet another constitutional guardrail, threatening to incapacitate the judiciary by suing every sitting judge in Maryland. It’s a looming constitutional crisis: an assault on the judiciary’s role enforcing the Constitution, launched by a feckless Justice Department doing the bidding of a president who views the rule of law as an obstacle to evade rather than a principle to uphold.
In the first weeks of August, this internecine battle comes to a Baltimore courtroom, where America’s executive will square off against its Judiciary in a momentous showdown testing whether our Constitution endures.
What prompted the clash?
In his role overseeing the court’s internal operations, Maryland’s chief judge issued a modest administrative order similar to those used by appellate courts around the country in certain high-stakes immigration cases. The order is aimed at ensuring judges have breathing room to do their work, by requiring the government to pause, by no more than two business days, the deportation of people who have filed habeas petitions challenging their removal.
