It is extremely surprising, however, that the conflict would be sought and stoked just weeks into Trump\u2019s four-year term, and for the sake of protecting Eric Adams, a Democratic mayor of a liberal city with just 11 months left in his term of office.<\/p>\n
The Trump Department of Justice is picking a fight with its own lawyers, not for some long-standing desire of the president\u2019s heart nor over some important point of constitutional interpretation, but to keep an official of the rival party, with no obvious political future, in office for a very short time. And to the extent that there appears to be any quid pro quo at work, as the Manhattan Institute\u2019s Charles Fain Lehman points out, all the Trump administration is getting from Adams is a promise to enforce existing immigration law \u2013 which given his myriad difficulties and limited tenure, is probably not worth very much.<\/p>\n
The assumption inside the Trump administration, one supposes, is that it\u2019s better to cull the potentially disloyal lawyers early, or to get them to prove their allegiance up front, so that you won\u2019t have to worry about dramatic resignations when you come to some much more important battle. Adams isn\u2019t important in his own right; he\u2019s just a useful test of obedience and discipline.<\/p>\n
The difficulty with that approach is that long before administrations get to some immense high-stakes clash, it\u2019s likely to have many, many smaller legal battles that it needs to have lawyered effectively. The Trump administration has picked a lot of those battles already, and quite a few of them \u2013 over the scope of the president\u2019s control over the bureaucracy, especially \u2013 are fights it should be able to win. But only with good arguments and effective counsel, not with a cavalcade of hacks filing its briefs.<\/p>\n
Thus the downside of enforcing absolute loyalty early, in a largely pointless battle, is that it signals to competent lawyers both inside and outside the administration that to work for Trump requires immediate subservience, not just cautious, careful service. And that signal tells the talented and principled, exactly the kind of lawyers Trump needs to win Supreme Court cases, that they\u2019re better off sitting this administration out.<\/p>\n
Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for <\/em>The New York Times since 2009. He is the author, most recently, of \u201cThe Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" was easy to predict that a diktat from Donald Trump\u2019s Justice Department would, at some point in his second term, prompt resignations from career prosecutors with conservative legal bona fides. Given Trump\u2019s crude transactionalism and his administration\u2019s determination to reshape the boundaries of executive power, it was always likely that we\u2019d get some version […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23505,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[125],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-23504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-newsletter-opinion"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23504\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23504"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=23504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}