Ready the Constitutional Crisis: White House Failed to Comply With Court Order, Judge Rules

Here is what this means.

The judge, John McConnell Jr., will have a choice to make either to hold Trump in Civil or Criminal contempt of court.

In Civil contempt that means he will be fined a certain amount each day until he complies.

If it's Criminal that means he will have to issue a bench warrant for the president's arrest which would be carried out by the U.S. Marshal service.

However, the marshals operate as a part of Trump's Justice Department headed up by Pam Bondi. They obviously would be compelled to not comply to the order from the judge.

But there is a catch: federal law mandates that the marshals follow any LEGAL order given them by the judges. And that is what the Trump fascists are counting on.

The Trump administration, since they are trying to challenge the legality of the constitution itself, will simply claim the judges' orders (there will be more by the way) are NOT CONSTITUTIONAL and therefore NOT LEGAL which will give the marshals enough reason to pause at least until the ‘question’ of legality can drag itself thru the courts.

Use the constitution and rule of law to destroy the constitution and the rule of law. That’s what Hitler did in Germany when he got out of jail and came to power in 1930.

By usurping both congressional and judicial over-sight, Trump and his fascist minions of Nazi sympathizers are currently casting off the entire set of checks and balances upon which this country was built and opting instead for the unitary executive or DICTATOR route Dick Cheney spoke of decades ago.

Yes, this is already a constitutional crisis. It's the showdown he wants. They can drag it out in court until these agencies wither on the vine and can never be repaired.

They intend to use the constitutional protections designed to afford the accused due process of law to destroy the constitution itself. And yes, that is exactly what Adolf Hitler did in Germany in 1930.

from the New York Times

A federal judge said on Monday that the White House had defied his order to release billions of dollars in federal grants, marking the first time a judge has expressly declared that the Trump administration is disobeying a judicial mandate.

The ruling by Judge John J. McConnell Jr. in Rhode Island federal court ordered administration officials to comply with what the judge called “the plain text” of an ruling he issued on Jan. 29.

That order, he wrote, was “clear and unambiguous, and there are no impediments to the Defendants’ compliance.”

Shortly after Monday’s ruling, Trump administration lawyers appealed the judge’s initial order to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, asking the appellate court to pause Judge McConnell’s order to keep federal funds flowing while their case was being considered. The White House responded with more defiance.

“Each executive order will hold up in court because every action of the Trump-Vance administration is completely lawful,” said Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman. “Any legal challenge against it is nothing more than an attempt to undermine the will of the American people.”

The legal actions on Monday marked a step toward what could evolve quickly into a high-stakes showdown between the executive and judicial branches, a day after Vice President JD Vance claimed in a social media post that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

Mr. Fields’s statement suggested that the president would ultimately prevail in court, but neither he nor the Justice Department explained what the White House would do in the meantime. It appeared that the administration was trying to win through the legal system’s established procedures, even as officials questioned the legitimacy of those procedures from the outside.

To that end, some of Mr. Trump’s supporters accused the judges ruling against the president of overstepping their authority.

“Activist judges must stop illegally meddling with the president’s Article II powers,” wrote Mike Davis, who leads the Article III Project, a conservative advocacy group.

The Democratic attorneys general driving much of the legal pushback pressed their position.

“No administration is above the law,” said Rob Bonta, the attorney general of California, in a statement shortly after Monday’s order. “The Trump administration must fully comply with the court’s order.”

Already, more than 40 lawsuits have been filed to challenge Mr. Trump’s moves, which have included revoking birthright citizenship and giving Elon Musk’s teams access to sensitive Treasury Department payment systems.

Judges have already made preliminary rulings that those two executive actions, the funding freeze and other orders may violate existing statutes. On Monday, federal judges maintained a steady flow of challenges to the president’s authority, temporarily blocking the Trump administration from reducing health research grants and maintaining a stay on efforts to coax federal employees to quit.

The question looming over Washington is how Mr. Trump will respond.

“It’s very rare for a president not to comply with an order,” said Victoria Nourse, the director of the Georgetown Law Center on Congress and Democracy, who was formerly Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s general counsel during his years as vice president. “This is part of a pattern where President Trump appears to be asserting authority that he doesn’t have.”

Judge McConnell had previously ordered the White House to unfreeze federal funds locked up by the White House budget office. A memo from that office had demanded that billions of dollars in grants be held back until they were determined to be in compliance with President Trump’s priorities and ideological agenda.

On Friday, 22 Democratic attorneys general went to Judge McConnell to accuse the White House of failing to comply with his earlier order. The Justice Department responded in a filing on Sunday that money for clean energy projects and transportation infrastructure, allocated to states by the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure bill, was exempt from the initial order because it had been paused under a different memo.

Judge McConnell’s ruling on Monday explicitly rejected that argument.

The judge granted the attorneys general’s request for a “motion to enforce” — essentially a nudge. It did not find that the Trump administration was in contempt of court or specify any penalties for failing to comply.

However, the judge was straightforward in his finding that the initial temporary restraining order that he issued Jan. 29 was not being followed.

“These pauses in funding violate the plain text of the T.R.O.,” Judge McConnell wrote. That earlier ruling ordered the administration not to “pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel or terminate” money that had already been allocated by Congress to the states to pay for Medicaid, school lunches, low-income housing subsidies and other essential services.

The judge also made clear that White House officials were obligated to comply regardless of how they thought the case might conclude. In his ruling on Monday, Judge McConnell quoted an opinion from a 1975 Supreme Court case noting that “persons who make private determinations of the law and refuse to obey an order generally risk criminal contempt even if the order is ultimately ruled incorrect.”

Going forward, if the judge finds that the government is still ignoring his initial order, he could order more than a dozen administration officials named in the lawsuit to explain why they should not be held in contempt of court, and then punish them with imprisonment — or, more likely, fines paid by their agencies, according to Adam Winkler, a professor at U.C.L.A School of Law.

“It’s unlikely you can put the secretary of an agency in jail,” he said, “but you can.”

The showdown is part of a broader effort by Mr. Trump’s opponents to get congressionally approved funding flowing again. Another order requiring that the disputed funds be released was issued last week by Judge Loren AliKhan of the District of Columbia. That case was filed by a coalition of nonprofits represented by Democracy Forward.

Skye Perryman, Democracy Forward’s chief executive, said that if there were to be a standoff between the executive and judicial branches, she hoped that the legislative branch would step in.

“That is really a call to action for Congress,” she said. “The judicial branch is not going to be able to stop this unlawful and extreme use of executive power on its own.”

The Trump administration has complied with the orders to unfreeze federal grants at least partially, but it is difficult to gauge precisely where funds remain stuck. The states have regained access to portals that allow them to be reimbursed for Medicaid. But David A. Super, a professor at Georgetown Law, said that he had heard directly from a number of groups, both inside and outside of government, that said their funding was still frozen.

“There’s no question that the government is not complying, has not even come close to complying, with the order,” Mr. Super said. “Even funds that weren’t frozen before the order are being frozen now.”

Mr. Super said Judge McConnell appeared to be trying to take the matter one step at a time.

“If you or I did this, the judge’s clerk would be on the phone saying, ‘Bring your toothbrush to the hearing to show cause because you might not be coming home tonight,’” he said. “This is the federal government, so the judge is trying to show restraint — expressing anger and reiterating its order, but not immediately bringing up penalties.”

The defiance may go beyond the domestic funding freeze. In another Monday filing, plaintiffs in a different lawsuit said that the Trump administration was still putting employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development on administrative leave, despite a court order requiring them to stop.