Vice President J.D. Vance, Elon Musk and other members of the Trump administration are openly challenging the age-old authority of the country's judiciary, predicting a possible constitutional collapse of the American government, writesCNNanalyst Joan Beskupich.
It's not just that the new administration has violated a number of federal laws and triggered a flood of lawsuits. It's also because some of Donald Trump's top advisers have questioned whether decisions on these lawsuits will restrain the president at all.
There are indications that some of the judges' orders have been ignored. A federal judge in Rhode Island has found that the administration violated the "plain language" of its previous order to unfreeze billions of dollars in federal aid. The judge ordered the restoration of funding for environmental, health care and other programs that had been cut.
In a separate case in Washington on Monday, federal employees told a judge that the administration had failed to reinstate employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development who had been furloughed. The Justice Department says the president should have the authority to decide how to run the government in such cases and when judges overstep their bounds.
Chief Justice John Roberts could have predicted this turn of events six weeks ago, when he warned in late December that “elected officials across the political spectrum have created a threat of open contempt for the decisions of federal courts. These dangerous proposals, however random, must be rejected outright.”
