What Courts Can Do If the Trump Administration Defies Court Orders

Judges have a range of tools for enforcing their orders in the face of noncompliance.

Yasmin Abusaif and Douglas Keith, Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law

They could simply post this picture
 of President Musk

More than 10 federal courts have temporarily halted or rejected actions by the new Trump administration on issues ranging from spending to birthright citizenship. Dozens more lawsuits against the administration’s early actions are pending. 

However, statements by top Trump adviser Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance openly challenging judicial authority have raised the possibility that the administration may ignore court rulings it opposes. 

Already, one judge has determined that the Trump administration is not taking sufficient action to follow their orders. So, what happens if the government refuses to obey federal court decisions?

As the Supreme Court has explained, it is a “basic proposition that all orders and judgments of courts must be complied with promptly.” Courts can — and often do — step in when their rulings are defied. Here’s an overview of the tools available to federal courts to compel compliance, or punish noncompliance, with their decisions.

How can federal courts enforce their orders?

Courts have several important tools available to enforce their orders, including contempt proceedings and attorney sanctions. Judges regularly use at least some of these enforcement tools against the private parties and government officials who appear before them.

Trump's Similarities to Hitler Prove It Certainly Could 'Happen Here'

We must stop being bashful about calling Trump a fascist - the shoe fits

THOM HARTMANN Common Dreams

The Nazis in America are now “out.” This morning, former Republican Joe Scarborough explicitly compared Trump and his followers to Hitler and his Brownshirts on national television. They’re here.

At the same time, America’s richest man is retweeting antisemitism, rightwing influencers and radio/TV hosts are blaming “Jews and liberals” for the “invasion” of “illegals” to “replace white people,” and the entire GOP is embracing candidates and legislators who encourage hate and call for violence.

Are there parallels between the MAGA takeover of the GOP and the Nazi takeover of the German right in the 1930s?

It began with a national humiliation: defeat in war. For Germany, it was WWI; for America it was two wars George W. Bush and Dick Cheney lied us into as part of their 2004 “wartime president” re-election strategy (which had worked so well for Nixon with Vietnam in 1972 and Reagan with Grenada in 1984).

Hitler fought in WWI but later blamed Germany’s defeat on the nation being “stabbed in the back” by liberal Jews, their fellow travelers, and incompetent German military leadership.

Trump cheered on Bush’s invasion of Iraq, but later lied and claimed he’d opposed the war. Both blamed the nation’s humiliation on the incompetence or evil of their political enemies.

The economic crisis caused by America’s Republican Great Depression had gone worldwide and Hitler used the gutting of the German middle class (made worse by the punishing Treaty of Versailles) as a campaign issue, promising to restore economic good times.

Trump pointed to the damage forty years of neoliberalism had done to the American middle class and promised to restore blue-collar prosperity. Hitler promised he would “make Germany great again”; Trump campaigned on the slogan: “Make America Great Again.”

Both tried to overthrow their governments by violence and failed, Hitler in a Bavarian beer hall and Trump on January 6th. Both then turned to legal means to seize control of their nations.

Hitler’s scapegoats were Jews, gays, and liberals. “There are only two possibilities,” he told a Munich crowd in 1922. “Either victory of the Aryan, or annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew.”

He promised “I will get rid of the ‘communist vermin’,” “I will take care of the ‘enemy within’,” “Jews and migrants are poisoning Aryan blood,” and “One people, one nation, one leader.”

Trump’s scapegoats were Blacks, Muslims, immigrants, and liberals.

Ethics Watchdog group issues new report comparing Trump and Biden Administrations’ compliance with the law

Biden administration financial disclosures show strong pattern of compliance

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW)

Introduction (To read the full report, CLICK HERE).

Stark differences between Biden and Trump administration officials’ financial disclosures highlight a need for reforms of ethics rules. 

A review of senior Biden administration officials’ financial disclosures for 2022 shows a high degree of compliance with divestiture obligations, and even includes examples of cabinet members going beyond required divestitures. 

In contrast, several notable examples from both the Trump White House and Cabinet illustrate how officials were permitted to retain holdings that presented significant concerns about conflicts of interest and appeared to allow them to profit off of their public positions. 

To prevent future abuses, Congress should adopt legislation that bans the president, vice president, cabinet members and all senior White House staff from owning and trading individual stocks and from retaining personal interests in family businesses that could make them susceptible to influence-peddling. 

We are the world's greatest democracy*

For more cartoons by Tom Tomorrow, CLICK HERE.

 

Look who's on the board of Steve Bannon's fraudulent "We Build the Wall" group

Class action filed against DeVos for seizing wages of 300,000 student loan borrowers

CARES Act forbids Education Department garnishment of wages during the pandemic

By Julia Conley, staff writer for Common Dreams

A home health aide who earns just under $13 per hour is the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed Thursday against Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, whose department has continued garnishing the wages of hundreds of thousands of student loan borrowers in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

The CARES Act, which was signed into law in late March, prohibits the Education Department from seizing the wages and tax refunds of student loan borrowers who have defaulted on their loans. 

But Elizabeth Barber of Rochester, New York, says the Trump administration has nonetheless continued to take 12% of her paychecks since the legislation passed—garnishing $70 from her check as recently as last week—adding to the financial strain which forced her to default on $10,000 in federal loans in December. 

Barber's hours have also been reduced by 10 to 15 hours per week since the coronavirus pandemic began.

"I am so worried about how I will get through this," Barber said in a statement. 

"I have no money in the bank. I need every dollar I earn at work to survive each day, but my hours have been cut because of the virus. I don't understand why the government keeps taking my money away after it passed a law that says they will stop."

Education Secretary’s mercenary brother ran spy missions on teachers’ union

Erik Prince recruited retired US and Brit spies to run illegal missions on Trump foes

By Jessica Corbett, staff writer for Common Dreams

An explosive March 7 New York Times report revealed that notorious war profiteer Erik Prince recruited former American and British spies to work with the right-wing group Project Veritas to infiltrate at least one Democratic congressional campaign and organizations "considered hostile" to President Donald Trump's agenda.

Prince is the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and founder of the mercenary firm Blackwater. 

Through a spokesperson, he declined the Times' request for comment on the piece, which is based on interviews and documents obtained by the newspaper, including internal Project Veritas emails.

"Both Project Veritas and Mr. Prince have ties to President Trump's aides and family," the Times noted. "Whether any Trump administration officials or advisers to the president were involved in the operations, even tacitly, is unclear. 

But the effort is a glimpse of a vigorous private campaign to try to undermine political groups or individuals perceived to be in opposition to Mr. Trump's agenda."

The results of the Times' investigation were described by readers on social media as "chilling," "stunning," and "insane." Jacobin magazine assistant editor Alex Press declared, "My paranoid fantasies are all true!" In response to a tweet about the reporting, author and activist Naomi Klein simply wrote, "Read."

Teachers' union takes on Trump

AFT Sues Betsy DeVos for Failing to Protect Defrauded Students

By Diane Ravitch

Forbes’ education writer Wesley Whistle writes about the lawsuit filed by AFT against Betsy DeVos for her failure to protect the students who were defrauded by colleges and universities, mostly for-profit.

DeVos rolled back an Obama-era regulation intended to prevent colleges from loading students with high debts and worthless degrees.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has one more lawsuit to deal with this week. Yesterday, one of the largest teachers unions in the country filed suit against DeVos and the Department of Education (Department). 

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is suing DeVos for repealing the “gainful employment” regulation that is meant to protect student borrowers from programs that load them up with debt that doesn’t yield a job with an income sufficient to repay their student loans.

Trump and DeVos insist on screwing student borrowers

Trump to students: don't go to college

By Jill Richardson 

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is back in the news on a topic close to my heart: student loans.

It’s close to my heart because I’m six years into a PhD program and six figures in debt right now. 

While my life has been immeasurably enriched by my education, I’m not taking on this amount of debt simply because I love learning.

Like anyone, I’m doing it because I need a job.

My student loans were a calculation of risk vs. reward: I took on this debt because I believed doing so would result in eventually finding a secure, well-paying job that would allow me to pay it back and then some. 

Just the learning, or even the degree alone, will not be worth it unless my degree leads me to a job.

That’s the calculation students make when they take out student loans. 

Education is a ticket to many salaried, middle class jobs, yet higher education is financially out of reach for many without loans.

Sociologist Sara Goldrick-Rab has documented many ways in which our existing financial aid system does not adequately serve the needs of low-income students — because it was created based on assumptions true of wealthier students only.

For example, typical aid calculations assume that parents will contribute to their children’s education, and children won’t be working to contribute to their parents’ household income.

Some students take out loans but don’t finish their degree — and they are left in debt with nothing to show for it. These are not lazy students. They are often working one or more jobs, sometimes raising children, and trying to go to college while living in poverty. Attempting to attend college leaves them worse off than if they had not tried at all.

Charter Schools’ Billion-Dollar Fraud Stinks Worse Than We Thought

Schools are NOT Amway factories

By Jeff Bryant

Earlier this year, when members of Congress repeatedly confronted U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos about a study finding the federal government’s charter school grant program had wasted an estimated $1 billion on schools that had never opened or opened and quickly closed, she dismissed the findings and accused the report authors of having a “political agenda against charter schools.” 

On December 10, the organization that published the study DeVos disparaged issued a more detailed examination of waste in the government’s charter grant program and concluded the $1 billion figure was indeed likely not correct—it was an underestimate.

The report “Still Asleep at the Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Results in a Pileup of Fraud and Waste” by the Network for Public Education (NPE) calculates approximately $1.17 billion in federal funding has been spent on charters that either never opened or that opened and have since shut down. 

Much of the added waste the study found in the charter program comes from the researchers’ findings that way more of these charters have closed or never opened than originally estimated. Based on its second passthrough of the data, NPE upped the failure rate of taxpayer-funded charter startups from 30 percent to 37 percent.

"The Chosen One?"

Rick Perry's belief that Trump was chosen by God is shared by many in a fast-growing Christian movement
Brad Christerson, Biola University and Richard Flory, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

In a recent interview with Fox News, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry stated that Donald Trump was chosen by God to be president. 

He said throughout history God had picked “imperfect people” such as King David or Solomon to lead their people.

Perry is not alone. 

A large number of evangelical Christians in the U.S. believe that God has chosen Donald Trump to advance the kingdom of God on Earth. 

Several high-profile religious leaders have made similar claims, often comparing Trump to King Cyrus who was asked by God to rescue the nation of Israel from exile in Babylon.

Many of these Christians are part of a movement that we call “Independent Network Charismatic,” or “INC Christianity” in our 2017 book.

Leaders such Rick Perry are connected to this movement. Eight years ago – in August of 2011 – more than 30,000 people cheered wildly when Perry, who was then a U.S. presidential candidate and Texas governor, came center stage at “The Response: A Call to Prayer for a Nation in Crisis” at Reliant Stadium in Houston. 

Perry quoted from the Bible and preached about the need for salvation that comes from Jesus. Many of the leaders who organized this event are the same leaders who claim that Trump is God’s chosen to advance the Kingdom of God.

We argue that INC Christianity is significantly changing the religious landscape in America – and the nation’s politics.

Trash public schools and push privatization

DeVos's formula for success 
Bryan Alexander, Georgetown University

When U.S Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos discussed the results from the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress, she described them as “devastating” and part of a worsening crisis in education.

The results showed a slight decline in reading scores and a flattening in math scores.

She noted that two out of three of the nation’s children aren’t proficient in reading. She also decried as ineffective the US$1 trillion in federal spending on education over the past 40 years, saying it has done nothing to stop the widening gap between the highest and lowest performing students.

“We cannot abide these poor results any longer,” DeVos stated. “We can neither excuse them away nor simply throw more money at the problem.”

As an education scholar, here are several issues that I see with DeVos’ take on the state of American education.

Education Secretary DeVos held in contempt

Violated court order to stop collecting on student loans from students defrauded by bankrupt for-profit college

By Jake Johnson, staff writer for Common Dreams

A federal judge on October 24 held President Donald Trump's billionaire Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in contempt of court for failing to comply with an order to stop collecting loan payments from former students of Corinthian Colleges, a defunct for-profit college company that defrauded tens of thousands of borrowers.

Judge Sallie Kim of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco also hit the Education Department with a $100,000 fine for violating the injunction.

"Money from the fine will be used to compensate the 16,000 people harmed by the federal agency's actions," the Washington Post reported. "Some former students of the defunct for-profit college had their paychecks garnished. Others had their tax refunds seized by the federal government."

The Education Department said in a statement that it made "mistakes" and did not intend to violate the order.

Betsy DeVos could be jailed for ignoring court ruling to protect student debtors

After Education Secretary Flouts 2018 Ruling, Judge Reminds Her of Consequences—Including Jail Time

By Eoin Higgins, staff writer for Common Dreams

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Monday was told in no uncertain terms that her refusal to abide by a 2018 order stopping her department from collecting on student loans made to predatory for-profit Corinthian College had the potential to land her in jail, though Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim made clear that was, for now, an unlikely outcome. 

"At best it is gross negligence, at worst it's an intentional flouting of my order,"  Kim told lawyers from the education department in court Monday. "I'm not sure if this is contempt or sanctions."

"I'm not sending anyone to jail yet," Kim added, "but it's good to know I have that ability."

As journalist Sarah Jaffe noted on Twitter, "Betsy DeVos is in trouble."

Kim ruled in 2018 that DeVos and the department had to stop collecting on student loans issued for attendees of Corinthian, which abruptly closed its doors in 2015. The school, an amalgam of distressed colleges bought and bundled by venture capitalists, was one of the largest chains of for-profit colleges in the U.S. before shutting down under a cloud of what The Washington Post said were "charges of fraud and predatory lending."

Looking for corruption, Mr. Trump?

Start with your His Rogues Gallery of a Cabinet 

By Terry H. Schwadron, DCReport Opinion Editor

For more cartoons by Ted Rall, CLICK HERE.

I’m more than amused by Donald Trump’s newfound insistence that he is in search of Corruption to unearth.

Indeed, in pursuit of Corruption, he is willing to walk all over the U.S. Constitution in order to tag political foe Joe Biden and his son as the source of a Shady Deal, with him risking impeachment by Congress in order to do so.

This comes as repeated new investigative efforts find no evidence of specific corruption in Biden joining calls across Western Europe for the removal of a Ukrainian top prosecutor who was seen as bending all decisions in favor of Russian oligarchs doing business in Ukraine – at the same time that his son had joined the board of a Ukrainian energy company.

But let’s take the president at his, um, ever-changing word. Maybe he is interested in unearthing Corruption. I certainly am.  After all who wouldn’t want to rein in “dishonest or fraudulent conduct by those in power, typically involving bribery” or other financial shenanigans.

Maybe he should look closer to home.

How many of his own Cabinet members used to represent the very companies they now are supposed to oversee?

Why does Trump keep doing this?

Either our system is going to break, or Trump’s finally going to fail. 

By Jill Richardson 

Does Trump understand democracy? I’m really asking.

His approach to politics is combative — kill-or-be-killed. If you hit him, he will hit you back harder, no matter what the rules of the game are.

That might be a great strategy in a WWE ring. It’s less good in life.

Trump gives demeaning and sometimes racist (e.g. “Pocahontas” for Elizabeth Warren) nicknames to political opponents.

He never apologizes, even when he has been caught admitting to sexual misconduct with women (and been accused of plenty more by a host of women) or making fun of a disabled person.

He appears to believe you are either the winner or the loser, and he must be the winner. His only strategy has been brute force. And he doesn’t seek out solutions in which all parties win.

This approach has been very destructive on the policy front. But it’s not clear whether it’s going to work for him in the long term.

DeVos sticks it to college students again

Trump Education Secretary makes it harder for students cheated by for-profit colleges to get relief

By Jessica Corbett, staff writer for Common Dreams

Critics condemned Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on August 30 for replacing Obama-era federal loan forgiveness regulations for student borrowers who claim that they were defrauded by their schools with new policies that could make it more difficult to access relief.

"On the Friday of Labor Day weekend, Betsy DeVos is gleefully forcing hundreds of thousands of students defrauded by for-profit colleges to suffer yet another indignity," Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement. "Shame on her."

Outlining the policy changes, which the Department of Education announced late Friday, The New York Times reported:

The new rules apply to federal student loans made from July 2020 onward. They will replace a set of policies, completed by the Obama administration in 2016, that Ms. DeVos had delayed carrying out until a court ordered her to do so last year.

Under the new rules, borrowers seeking loan forgiveness will have much higher hurdles to clear.

They will need to prove that their college made a deceptive statement "with knowledge of its false, misleading, or deceptive nature or with reckless disregard for the truth," and that they relied on the claim in deciding to enroll or stay at the school. They will also need to show that the deception harmed them financially.

Department Of Education Agenda: Make room for the Holy Ghost

Amid Budget Cuts, DeVos Supports Christian Bible Classes in Public Schools

By Terry H. Schwadron, DCReport Opinion Editor

The Trump administration has proposed a 12% cut in Department of Education spending under its yearly budget. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is busily eliminating programs to help public schools and promoting private education efforts under the motto of choice. 

Yet somehow, magically, there is support for the growth of teaching Christian Bible classes in public schools.

Once again, we have an out-and-out statement about what is important in this administration—not school shootings, not affirmative efforts to improve public education, not help with student debt or even the pursuit of growing sexual assault on school campuses.

Counseling Today magazine argues, for example, that it has become necessary to lobby seriously to keep federal money for school mental health.

The Trump administration’s federal budget proposal cut $8.5 billion from the Department of Education, including the Student Support and Academic Enrichment program. That program supported, among other things, mental health, school security and safety, community engagement—the kind of programs that would address the issues we hear after every school shooting.

Soul man

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