So to start off, could you tell us about that book project and sort of how it came about and, and how it has developed?

Yeah.

So I started working on this book project, I think, back in 2022 or '23, but in fact, it grew out of work that I had done for many years on constraints on executive power.

And I was interested in, among other things, the role of lawyers in the executive branch as a constraint or not on political decision-making that the executive made.

And I had done a fair bit of work on that question.

And then as we saw the first Trump administration unfold, and especially in the sort of catastrophic end when there were not only all kinds of challenges to the election in court, but the post-election series of efforts to challenge the election, culminating obviously in the January 6th attack in 2021, lawyers were front and center in that conflict.

And for better and worse, that is to say, if you think about the legal profession, and I think it's important to talk about the whole profession, which includes not just lawyers, but judges and, you know, law students and from, from soup to nuts, so to speak, there were really very, very different responses, and it did not at all track partisan lines per se, right? So we saw many, many lawyers and judges, including in the Department of Justice, including lawyers who had been appointed by Trump himself in the first administration, plenty of Republican-appointed lawyers on the bench, and obviously Democratic lawyers and judges as well, push back very hard and in critical and ways at pivotal moments and were instrumental constraints, not just on executive power, but if you think about this in, in constitutional democracy terms, were the bulwarks.

So for listeners who haven't followed that history as closely as you have, what are the links in that chain that people should know about?

What is the Trump administration arguing and how have lower courts previously ruled on this?

So the way we got here was several months ago, the president decided apparently spontaneously to fire one of the governors of the Federal Reserve, a move that hasn't happened.

in more than a century of the history of the Federal Reserve.

There was a lawsuit she sued challenging the legality of the president's firing.

Federal Reserve governors can only be removed by law for cause.

That suit has now made its way to the court, but to be clear, the underlying constitutional question, how much power does the president have to remove Federal Reserve governors isn't before the court technically.

What's before the court is whether she had any right to process and what it actually means, what suffices as good cause to remove a Federal Reserve governor.

So then what are the cases that do present that in your view that really impact the Constitution and how we all live as Americans?

So there are a lot and more every day.

We were just hearing in the report immediately before this, these extraordinary call-outs of the National Guard or efforts to send a federalized National Guard from other states and send them to other states.

Those cases aren't at the Supreme Court yet.

They will surely get there sooner or later, and I think almost certainly this term.

But before that, we have just this month, a dramatic case involving the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act, which has been on the books since 1965.

The Supreme Court significantly narrowed its scope about a decade ago under Chief Justice John Roberts.

Do you think those rulings give any insight into how the court will decide these pivotal cases?

Debra, what are the most pressing Constitutional issues raised by these particular cases?

So, um, there are a lot of Constitutional issues [laughs] raised I think that are all pressing.

I- I would put the defiance of Supreme Court orders, um, at the top of all of these lists, right? And we're there or very nearly there both with Kilmar's case and also this broader case that was the initial case about the, um, transportation of hundreds of, uh, you know, alleged, although we don't really know who they are, [laughs] right? Uh, people to El Salvador.

So, um, those two cases were- were right on the edge of defiance, and we are on the edge of defiance and- and maybe over it in a lot of the expenditure and- and withholding of funds cases too.

On the immigration side, um, I think the case that involves, you know, rescinding, removing, just stripping away status that was otherwise legal on the basis of speech that is distasteful to the president, and, you know, people will say, "Oh my God, this speech was so...

Uh, you know, what- what they said was so sort of milk toast." It wasn't [laughs] even that sort of severe, but that really misses the point.

The point is we're using these authorities not to go after, you know, what they campaigned on which is, "Oh, we have this problem at the border.

Deborah, lay out what these next steps are, from demanding sworn statements all the way to potentially appointing an outside prosecutor and explain w- what's the strategy here? What- what does he have at his disposal?

Could you help us understand how the administration is continuing these deportations? We had one judge say, "I'm going to block you from doing, using this, this, uh, Alien Enemies Act to deport people," and then another judge on Friday said, "You can't deport people who don't have some national connection to the countries you're sending them to." So, how are these deportations continuing?

continuing?So, thanks for having me.

Uh, the first thing to say is, we don't fully know or know at all what legal basis the president is invoking to continue these deportations.

That's in part by design.

It makes it harder to challenge the legality of what he's doing.

But there are several possibilities of what's going on here.

Um, one possibility with the recent deportations of more alleged Venezuelans over the weekend, is that the president is continuing to use authority under the Alien Enemies Act, which he invoked before.

Help us understand, why are they doing that? What is behind that effort, in your view?