Why Trump Keeps Losing in Court
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 28 May 2019
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Everywhere President Trump turns, he’s finding himself hemmed in by the courts. But could upcoming rulings from the Supreme Court make lower court judges take a more expansive view of the president’s executive powers?
Guest: Slate writer Mark Joseph Stern.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When I think about the Democrats in Congress right now, it feels to me like they're on this vast, legalistic treasure hunt. |
| 0:12.9 | And they've got just one superpower, subpoena power. |
| 0:18.9 | They've subpoenaed the president's lawyer. |
| 0:21.2 | They've subpoenaed the president's lawyer. They've subpoenaed the president's son and Trump's bank and Trump's accounting firm. |
| 0:27.7 | Yeah, it just feels to me like Congress must be running out of a letterhead. |
| 0:30.9 | Like they're constantly requesting more from more people. |
| 0:34.4 | Yes, that's right. |
| 0:35.4 | And their requests have begun to escalate in this very sort of |
| 0:40.3 | polite but pissy, democratic way. Mark Joseph Stern is a writer here at Slate. I think that could |
| 0:46.6 | sort of be the motto of the Democratic Party right now, polite but pissy. Many of these congressional |
| 0:53.9 | subpoenas focus on Trump's financial records, analysis of the president's assets from Deutsche Bank, |
| 1:00.6 | tax records from Mazars Group, Trump's accounting firm. |
| 1:04.7 | Trump has vowed to fight all of them in court. |
| 1:07.3 | And it's one of the most remarkable intra-branched disputes that we've seen in a really |
| 1:12.7 | long time because this is not a constitutional crisis, I think, but it is an example of the |
| 1:19.1 | president stepping into the judiciary and saying, you got to stop these guys in the house |
| 1:25.2 | because they're overstepping their bounds. |
| 1:33.3 | Last week, congressional Democrats got the first hint that the courts could be on their side. |
| 1:39.5 | You had Nancy Pelosi seeming almost giddy at what happened in court last week. |
| 1:45.5 | Yes. And Democrats don't know what it feels like to win, so you should never trust them when they say they are winning. |
| 1:50.9 | There are a couple of different cases here. One in D.C., the other in New York. |
| 1:59.3 | And so both of these district courts said, sorry Trump, but you just don't have the power to force us to quash these subpoenas. |
... |
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