Executive Disorder

Less than 24 hours after the peaceful transfer of power earlier this week, the rule of law came under threat.

One of President Trump’s first actions after returning to power was an attempt to deny some children born in the United States of their constitutionally guaranteed U.S. citizenship. The executive order plainly violates the 14th Amendment, which says every child born here is a citizen, equal under the law and entitled to full participation in our civic life.

But the president doesn’t get to rewrite the Constitution. Attorneys general from 22 states quickly filed lawsuits, and a federal judge soon blocked the order from taking effect while the lawsuits move through the courts. The judge called the order “blatantly unconstitutional” and said he couldn’t remember a clearer case in more than four decades on the bench.

On his first day, Trump also granted pardons and commutations to almost all of the roughly 1,600 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. That includes those accused of attacking police officers with baseball bats, flagpoles, and pepper spray. Trump granted sweeping clemency even though Americans overwhelmingly oppose pardons for people who committed violent crimes on Jan. 6.

Pardons are within the president’s power, but something larger is at stake: Crimes against law enforcement are “attacks on society and undermine the rule of law,” as the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Fraternal Order of Police said in a joint statement. The officers on duty that day were defending more than just the Capitol, and the people who brutally assaulted them will now walk free.

Image: President Trump in Washington on Inauguration Day. (U.S. Department of Homeland Security/Tia Dufour via Wikimedia Commons)

This Week in Democracy

• Shortly after his inauguration, President Trump signed a variety of orders. Among them were pardons for more than 1,500 individuals accused of crimes during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. 14 individuals had their sentences commuted.

  ➡️ READ: Across Party Lines, Americans Oppose Pardons for Jan. 6 Violence

• One of Trump’s executive orders attempted to deny citizenship to some people born on U.S. soil, exactly the opposite of what the Constitution’s 14th Amendment says. The next day, 22 states and two cities sued the Trump administration seeking to block the order. A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked the order from going into effect, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.”

  ➡️ READ: Sharing the Facts About Birthright Citizenship

• Another executive order directed multiple agencies, including the Justice Department, to investigate work done during the Biden administration and find supposed evidence of political bias. The order is based on unfounded accusations that the agencies had been “weaponized” by the Biden administration and has raised concerns of retaliation by the Trump administration.
• Judge Aileen Cannon blocked Congress from viewing the second volume of former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report about Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified information.

State of the States

In Pennsylvania, the state Supreme Court agreed to hear a case challenging the Commonwealth’s requirement that voters provide a handwritten date on absentee and mail-in ballots. The case is being brought by two Pennsylvania voters whose mail-in ballots were rejected in a September special election because they were improperly dated. They argue that rejecting ballots that are missing a handwritten date or that are incorrectly dated violates the state constitution, since the dating requirement serves no purpose and election officials independently confirm whether a ballot was cast on time.

A few days after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up a similar case challenging the dating requirement under federal law.