Is Trump About to Go Extra-Constitutional? Rule by Decree, Bypassing Congress?

Trump's totalitarian instincts have never lurked very far from the surface. Now there's word he's looking for ways to circumvent the House and Senate so that he can rule America by decree. And who is advising this would-be despot but John Yoo, the Bush/Cheney-era counsel who wrote an opinion that waterboarding was not torture.

John Yoo told Axios he has been talking to White House officials about his view that a recent supreme court ruling on immigration would allow Trump to issue executive orders that flout federal law. 

In a Fox News Sunday interview, Trump declared he would try to use that interpretation to try to force through decrees on healthcare, immigration and “various other plans” over the coming month. 

Constitutional scholars and human rights activists have also pointed to the deployment of paramilitary federal forces against protesters in Portland as a sign that Trump is ready to use this broad interpretation of presidential powers as a means to suppress basic constitutional rights. 

“This is how it begins,” Laurence Tribe, a Harvard constitutional law professor, wrote on Twitter. “The dictatorial hunger for power is insatiable. If ever there was a time for peaceful civil disobedience, that time is upon us.” 

Yoo became notorious for a legal memo he drafted in August 2002, when he was deputy assistant attorney general in the justice department’s Office of Legal Counsel. 

It stated: “Necessity or self-defense may justify interrogation methods that might violate’ the criminal prohibition against torture.” 

Memos drafted by Yoo were used for justifying waterboarding and other forms of torture on terrorism suspects in CIA “black sites” around the world.

Trump is unrepentant about dispatching "little green men" to the streets of Portland, Oregon, over the opposition of the mayor and governor. He said he's planning to do the same to other cities soon.

Tribe called Yoo’s interpretation of the Daca ruling “indefensible”. 

He added: “I fear that this lawless administration will take full advantage of the fact that judicial wheels grind slowly and that it will be difficult to keep up with the many ways Trump, aided and abetted by Bill Barr as attorney general and Chad Wolf as acting head of homeland security, can usurp congressional powers and abridge fundamental rights in the immigration space in particular but also in matters of public health and safety.” 

Alka Pradhan, a defence counsel in the 9/11 terrorism cases against inmates in the Guantánamo Bay prison camp, said: “John Yoo’s so-called reasoning has always been based on ‘What can the president get away with?’ rather than ‘What is the purpose and letter of the law?’ 

“That is not legal reasoning, it’s inherently tyrannical and anti-democratic.”