https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-4-2025
"In an interview aired today on
NBC News’s
Meet the Press, reporter Kristen
Welker asked President Donald J. Trump if he agreed that every person in the
United States is entitled to due process.
“I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know,” Trump answered.
The U.S. Constitution guarantees that “no person shall…be deprived of life,
liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Judges across the political
spectrum agree that the amendment does not limit due process to citizens. In
his decision in the 1993 case
Reno v. Flores, conservative icon Justice
Antonin Scalia wrote: “it is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles
aliens to due process of law in deportation proceedings.”
In his oath of office, Trump vowed to “preserve, protect and defend the
Constitution of the United States.”
When Welker pointed out that the Constitution guarantees due process, Trump
suggested he could ignore it because honoring due process was too slow. “I
don’t know,” he said. “It seems—it might say that, but if you’re talking about
that, then we’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials,” he
said. “We have thousands of people that are—some murderers and some drug
dealers and some of the worst people on Earth.”
“I was elected to get them the hell out of here, and the courts are holding me
from doing it,” he added.
Welker tried again. “[D]on’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United
States?”
Trump replied: “I don’t know. I have to respond by saying, again, I have
brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what
the Supreme Court said.”
Conservative judge J. Michael Luttig explained to
MSNBC’s Ali Velshi that
far-right scholars have argued that the president does not have to follow the
Supreme Court if he doesn’t agree with its decisons: he can interpret the
Constitution for himself. Luttig called this “constitutional denialism.” He
added that “[t]he American people deserve to know if the President does not
intend to uphold the Constitution of the United States or if he intends to
uphold it only when he agrees with the Supreme Court.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
