Trump regime's executive power 'blocking judges' control', breaking the separation of powers, 'solo Administration'
The Trump regime clashed with state governments by creating a hard-line conservative system by 'blocking judges' control' of the executive power.
The question of who can decide the limits of the executive power has now started a war of hard-line conservative systems in the US and Korea, which imitates the US democratic system.
US Vice President JD Vance wrote on the 10th in X, "Judges cannot control the legitimate power of the executive branch" regarding the relationship between the presidency and the courts, and 17 attorneys general from 17 Democratic states countered in a joint statement, saying, "It is as wrong as it is reckless" and "No one is above the law."
The Trump administration, which is leading the mass layoff of federal workers by executive order, immediately protested when Judge John J. McConnell Jr. of the Rhode Island District Court ruled on the 9th to “freeze” the spending of federal funds requested by the president. The ruling on that day approved “consent to execute” considering that the government was ignoring the ruling, and the Vice President responded by attacking, saying, “The ruling cannot block the executive power.” None of these cases have been finally decided, but this seems to mean an extreme breakdown of the constitutional order.
The New York Times reported on the 15th that “at least some of them are very likely to be dealt with by the Supreme Court,” and “some legal commentators believe that the Trump administration’s strategy is to flood the region with extreme executive actions in the hope that the Supreme Court will rule on some of them as legal, thereby expanding the White House’s legitimate constitutional power.” The New York Times diagnosed that Vice President Vance's X article "means an extreme breakdown of the constitutional order," saying, "The executive branch, not the courts, can decide that it is the arbiter of limitations on its own constitutionally designated authority and choose to ignore judicial decisions."
The US Constitution has been interpreted for over 200 years, and according to Article 3, "The judicial power shall apply to all cases arising under this Constitution," the Constitution presents judges as the "arbitrators of the limits of the executive branch's power."
The Trump administration's hard-line conservative strategy is to abuse executive orders in an attempt to neutralize the constitutional order in the federal judiciary, and federal judges are responding with 'preliminary orders' to block the most aggressive exercise of power by the executive branch.
In the 1980 Reagan administration, the hard-line conservative strategy was to neutralize the US Congress, and the Republican Party, which was a minority party, attempted to 'neutralize laws through executive orders' and 'neutralize Congress's budget decision-making power and auditing'. This was carried out as a strategy of 'neutralizing domestic laws through international agreements' and 'neutralizing federal laws through conservative state laws' in the destruction of domestic environmental regulations.
With the Reagan administration's 'neutralizing domestic laws and Congress through international agreements' strategy, Central and South America became the first target of free trade agreements and arms smuggling, and the Chun Doo-hwan regime in Korea served as a lever to spread this internationally, which was inherited by the Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung regimes, and the Korean economy achieved rapid growth.
As the national law was weakened by the parliamentary checks and balances, and the domestic political parties were weakened, the right to political self-determination was deprived, and the international war abuse and abuse of public power led to fiscal deficits and trade deficits, and the twin deficit system led to the international financial crisis and the Korean foreign exchange crisis.
The Trump second term has been marked by fierce clashes between the president's executive orders and court rulings since the beginning, and related lawsuits have already exceeded 60.
The court put the brakes on Trump's 'birthright citizenship deprivation order' by freezing federal spending worth $3 trillion and terminating the 14th Amendment's birthright citizenship guarantee. The Trump administration has attempted to lead a massive downsizing of the federal government, led by Musk, and has attempted to fire government employees before their legally mandated terms end, forcibly transfer trans women incarcerated in prisons to male facilities, and transfer sensitive data and systems to newly established quasi-agencies, which are currently being litigated.
Most of the major cases led by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is the leader, have been litigated, and more than two lawsuits have been filed against the administration for every day that Trump has been in office.
The New York Times said of the lawsuits, “Most of the plaintiffs claim that the Trump administration’s actions are extremely violent, literally ‘exceeding its authority,’” and “This means that Trump has exercised his power in a way that exceeds his legal authority.” The early 1990s denial of the ascendancy of the American hard-line conservatism was a new trend in the Republican Party in the form of “conservative legal thought,” which involved a radical reinterpretation of the powers granted to the president by the Constitution, and now has more and more collaborators among elected Republicans, which Vice President Vance has revealed in this strategy.
Regarding the radical hard-line conservatism of the Constitution, the New York Times stated, “Many of them can be traced back to originalism, a set of doctrines that American conservatives have relied on since the 1980s.” “Originalism has many branches, but its essence is that the clear text of the Constitution, that is, what is considered the ‘original public meaning’ of the Constitution at the time of the founding of the country, can be used to reverse what is perceived as the gradual excesses of the judiciary in the mid- to late-20th century.” The day before Vance wrote on X that "judges cannot control the limits of the legitimate power of the executive," he shared an article by Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule, which stated that "judicial interference with legitimate state action, especially the internal functioning of equal agencies, violates the separation of powers," and presented it as a theoretical framework.
On the 11th, the Wall Street Journal supported Vance's X post with the title of Professor Vermeule's article, "JD Vance's Tweets Are Not a Crisis," and the subtitle, "Judges Have a Duty to Respect the Separation of Powers, Too. Usually They Do."
In his article, Professor Vermeule defended Vance as follows:
"Did Vice President JD Vance's recent tweets trigger a constitutional crisis? Many journalists and law professors seem to think so. "If a judge were to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, it would be illegal," Vance wrote. “If a judge were to try to dictate to the attorney general how to use his discretion as a prosecutor, that would also be illegal. Judges cannot control the legitimate power of the executive branch,” he said. Vance’s more blunt critics assumed that the executive branch was preparing or threatening to ignore the court order. But to put it more bluntly, he was referring to legal principles of legitimacy, reviewability, and standing, as well as the so-called “political question doctrine,” which are themselves legal principles that courts apply when they have jurisdiction to review executive actions.
All of these principles are ultimately rooted in the statutes that embody and implement the constitutional separation of powers or the separation of powers.” In the op-ed, the professor dismissed concerns that Vance was asking for a challenge to a judicial order as “an unbalanced response,” saying that Vance was simply “referring to legal principles of legitimacy, reviewability, standing, and the so-called political question doctrine.”
The New York Times described Professor Vermeul as “an ideological guide among conservatives who believe that originalism alone cannot achieve desired policy outcomes,” and “He calls himself a ‘classical legal theorist,’ and his work is supported by quotations and footnotes that demonstrate his mastery of classical legal canons (Justinian’s Digest, Aquinas’s Summa, Institutes of Gaius). He argues that a solid understanding of the Constitution requires a deep immersion in ancient sources and theories on natural law, divine law, and Roman law, all of which influenced the Framers and are reflected in the Constitution.” In the aftermath of 9/11, Congress effectively gave up its constitutional authority to declare war by combining the War Powers Act of 1973 with a 2001 law authorizing the use of military force against terrorists and countries harboring them. The Supreme Court ruled in 2024 in Trump v. U.S. that a president who performs his constitutional duties cannot be criminally liable.
The project of fundamentally legitimizing the imperial presidency’s reliance on executive orders has grown into a more difficult “national divide” and “governmental system threat” than the separation of powers.
The New York Times asked, “If America really wants separation of powers, why have two of the three branches chosen to give up so much of their power?” At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Professor Vermeul published an op-ed in The Atlantic titled “Beyond Originalism” (March 31, 2020). The op-ed reads: “In recent years, allegiance to the constitutional theory known as originalism has become almost mandatory for American legal conservatives. Every Supreme Court justice and virtually every judge appointed by recent Republican administrations has pledged to uphold the faith. Speakers at the influential legal conservative association, the Federalist Society, say and think little else. Even some prominent figures in left-liberal legal academia have moved away from talking about “living constitutionalism,” “fundamental fairness,” and “evolving standards of decency,” and instead justify their views in originalist terms. “We are all originalists now.” I often hear the catchphrase.>
He converted to Catholicism in 2016 and shortly thereafter published an article.
In the article, he presented an originalist vision of “strong rule” as “a vision of the common good that integrates and somehow transcends written law” and “strong rule to achieve the common good is entirely legitimate,” praising what he called “common good constitutionalism” as a defense against the “universal flood of economic-technological domination” of the Church.
Garrett Epps, a retired law professor, wrote an article opposing Professor Vermeul’s Atlantic article, stating, “Common good constitutionalism is dangerous in itself.”
<Adrian Vermeule, Ralph S. Tyler Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, is by no means a peripheral figure> and <He is just over 50 years old and has built a reputation as a brilliant but distinct conservative theorist on administrative law and the Constitution. Having converted to Catholicism four years ago, he has a radically conservative stance on law and society. His chosen philosophy is called "integralism," which calls for the subordination of the state to the principles of the Catholic Church>. Professor Epps called 'originalism' "an argument for authoritarian extremism," "an anti-constitutional philosophy," and a sign of an "era of extralegalism."
Washington Post columnist George F. in “When American Conservatism Becomes Un-American” (May 29, 2020) states that “the latest temptation for conservatives toward authoritarianism comes from Harvard Law School,” and that “Professor Adrian Vermeul, a 2016 Catholic convert, is an “integralist” who regrets his specialty, the Constitution, and rejects the separation of church and state.
His recent Atlantic essay, which advocates a government that judges “the quality and moral worth of public speech,” is not significant as a practical political statement, but is a symptom of the fever, despair, and temptation of some conservatives.” Regarding traditional conservatives, the New York Times states that “conservatives have long pursued a more expansive view of presidential power, often pursuing the ‘single executive theory’—the idea that the president personally embodies the entire branch of government.” Vice President Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019, and the Ohio senator in 2019. He said in an interview with the American Conservative on July 17, 2024, after being nominated as vice president at the Republican National Convention, that the reason for his conversion to Catholicism was that “there was a real overlap between what I wanted to see and what the Catholic Church wanted to see.”
“The Republican Party has had too long a partnership between social conservatives and market liberals. I don’t think social conservatives have benefited very much from that partnership.
One of the challenges for social conservatism to survive in the 21st century is not just about issues like abortion, but having a broader vision of political economy and the common good.”
Separation of powers, hard-line conservatism, strong rule, single-handed administration, Reagan regime, originalism, Trump regime, judge control, executive power, executive order