The New Yorker:

A flurry of seemingly illegal orders and firings could tee up the Supreme Court to cement a vast expansion of Presidential authority.

By Isaac Chotiner

Throughout his first two weeks in office, Donald Trump has been firing officials across the federal government, including inspectors general at Cabinet agencies and prosecutors at the Department of Justice. In the former case, Trump was required by law to inform Congress in advance, and to provide a “substantive rationale.” (He did not.) The latter case may have violated civil-service protections for nonpolitical members of the federal bureaucracy. It remains to be seen exactly how the courts—and perhaps even the Supreme Court, which has shown deference to broad theories of executive power—will respond to Trump’s actions.

I recently spoke by phone with Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law professor and former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. (He co-writes a Substack called Executive Functions.) Goldsmith recently told the New York Times, about these issues, “We’re going to find out a lot about Chief Justice Roberts’s ultimate commitments.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed just how strategic the Administration’s actions are, why the Roberts Court might be likely to affirm extreme theories of executive power, and what Trump is really trying to do to the Justice Department.

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