
I wasn’t trying to influence the White House,” he said, noting his articles were intended to criticize what he thought the court got wrong. Liberal legal scholars said Yoo, who served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under Bush, was wildly off-base and reading far too much into a decision that focused on the administration’s sloppiness.īut Yoo said that soon after publication of the articles, he received a call from White House officials he declined to name.

#Torture memoranda free
In National Review, Yoo suggested Trump could, for instance, now create a nationwide right to carry guns openly by refusing to enforce federal firearms laws and then creating a new “Trump permit” that would free any holder of local gun restrictions. Under the court’s decision, he wrote in Newsweek, “presidents can now stop enforcing laws they dislike, hand out permits or benefits that run contrary to acts of Congress and prevent their successors from repealing their policies for several years.” But Yoo has made the case in several articles that the court, in its ruling, invalidated one of the main checks on presidential power: the ability of new presidents to immediately undo executive action enacted by their predecessors. Roberts, joined by the court’s four liberals justices, notably did not conclude one way or the other whether DACA is legal. The program was created by former President Barack Obama and provided legal protections to some 650,000 immigrants brought to the country as children.Ĭhief Justice John Roberts’ opinion castigated the administration for cutting legal corners, finding its conduct “arbitrary and capricious” under a 1946 federal law that guides how agencies develop regulations and policies. The court concluded in its 5-4 decision that the Trump administration did not take the proper steps to end DACA. “The decision by the Supreme Court on DACA allows me to do things on immigration, on health care, on other things that we’ve never done before,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News Sunday, predicting “a very exciting two weeks.”
#Torture memoranda series
Not long after the conversations, Trump began promising a series of new executive orders on a range of issues. “This gives President Trump an alternative to create such a program, at least for a few years.” replace it with ‘skills-based immigration system,’” Yoo said he told the White House. “I said, ‘Why not just take the DACA opinion itself and do a search-replace. Yoo told The Associated Press on Thursday he’s had multiple conversations with senior administration officials in which he’s made the case that a June Supreme Court ruling that rejected Trump’s effort to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, opened the door to enormous new presidential power.

Bush administration used to justify using “enhanced interrogation” techniques after the Sept. The expansive view of presidential authority has been promoted by John Yoo, a Berkeley Law professor known for writing the so-called “torture memos” that the George W.

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump is relying on an outlier interpretation of a recent Supreme Court decision to assert broad new powers as he prepares to sign a series of executive orders in the coming weeks.
