In an op-ed for the Daily Caller on Thursday, Federalist Society Chairman and former Yale Law School dean Steven G. Calabresi said that no modern president “has done more to restore the Constitution” than Donald J. Trump.
Responding to a column in The New York Times written by the “Checks and Balances” conservative group, which accused Trump of endangering the rule of law, Calabresi laid out his case for the president and his faithful adherence to constitutional integrity.
“The president’s first responsibility under the Constitution is ‘to preserve, protect and defend’ it from all enemies foreign and domestic,” wrote Calabresi. “This language appears in the oath that each president takes when he is sworn into office.
“The first way in which the president preserves, protects, and defends the Constitution is by appointing judges who are faithful to its original meaning,” he continued. “President Trump has done that in spades with his two superb appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh are brilliant, originalist lawyers who graduated at the top of their classes from Harvard and Yale Law School and who clerked on the U.S. Supreme Court. You could not have done much better with Supreme Court nominations.”
Calabresi went on to note that Trump’s court appointment at the federal appeals level continued this mission of preserving and protecting our nation’s founding document.
Calabresi said that Trump also stripped the Justice Department of the political mess it had gathered around it during the Obama years, even to the point of sticking by Attorney General Jeff Sessions long after it was clear he’d lost confidence in the man. “This again,” Calabresi noted, “is far more than Trump should have had to do.”
From that point forward, Calabresi praises Trump as much for what he has not done as what he has. He says that he could have, at any point, fired Robert Mueller and thrown Washington into a tailspin. Instead, Trump and his lawyers went above and beyond in their cooperation with the special counsel’s office, providing Mueller with thousands of pages of documents and hours of testimony from White House counsel Don McGahn.
“This level of cooperation by Trump with Mueller goes way beyond anything that Trump needed to do,” he wrote, “and he gets an A + for that as well.”
No group in this country cares more about the proper and faithful interpretation and implementation of the Constitution than the Federalist Society. For them to confer upon President Trump this praise speaks volumes about 45’s commitment to the rule of law.
Not that you would ever in a million years know it by watching the mainstream media.
