Legal scholars dispute Trump's claim to power 'nobody thought the president had'

Source: Washington Post

Legal scholars dispute Trump’s claim to power ‘nobody thought the president had’

By Robert Barnes
8/5/2020, 6:41:44 p.m.

President Trump has routinely asserted his outsize view of presidential power, but his claim to unprecedented clout in recent weeks springs from an unlikely source: one of his defeats at the Supreme Court.

Trump has asserted that with the stroke of a pen he can break through gridlock on immigration, health care, the stalemate on relief for those hurt economically by the coronavirus pandemic, even mail-in balloting.

“The Supreme Court gave the president of the United States powers that nobody thought the president had,” Trump told Fox News interviewer Chris Wallace on July 19.

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John Yoo, the professor, has proclaimed Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s opinion stopping the Trump administration from dismantling the Obama-era program protecting young undocumented immigrants a blessing in disguise. He contends that it allows presidents to take even unlawful actions that can require years of legal battles to undo.

To say that Yoo’s view of the court’s 5-to-4 decision on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program is an outlier would be an understatement.

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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/trump-john-yoo-supreme-court-executive-power/2020/08/05/f018330c-d677-11ea-930e-d88518c57dcc_story.html