Wednesday, February 19

Since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, it’s been an onslaught of legal challenges to his many executive orders and personnel terminations. And now the U.S. Supreme Court will finally weigh in on one of them: the firing of special counsel Hampton Dellinger. Will SCOTUS rebuff Trump? Also in this edition of Eye On The Right: Trump continues to gut the nation’s cybersecurity agency and what happens if the president defies court orders.

As always, thanks for reading.

— Matt Cohen, Senior Staff Writer

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Will SCOTUS Rebuff the Trump Administration?

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on its firing of Dellinger, the head of the office of the special counsel (OSC), teeing up the new administration’s first big test of the nation’s highest court. Will the majority conservative makeup of SCOTUS bend the knee to Trump, or will it uphold the rule of law?

On Feb. 7, the Trump administration fired Dellinger, for no given reason, in a one sentence email: “On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as Special Counsel of the US Office of Special Counsel is terminated, effective immediately,” the email read.

The office of the special counsel, according to the 1978 law that created the position, is meant to be an independent, non-partisan federal agency untethered to the changing political winds of a new administration. The OSC is the federal agency tasked with protecting federal whistleblowers — investigating reports of corruption, fraud and government waste — and protecting federal employees from retaliation for blowing the whistle.

So it came to Dellinger’s surprise when he was unceremoniously fired, without so much as an explanation. And it may have violated federal law. After his termination, Dellinger sued the Trump administration Feb. 10, alleging that the action was unlawful because, according to the lawsuit, “The Special Counsel may be removed by the President only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Because Trump gave no reason for dismissing Dellinger, his firing “is in direct conflict with nearly a century of precedent that defines the standard for removal of independent agency officials and upholds the legality of virtually identical for-cause removal protections for the heads of independent agencies.”

A district court judge seemed to agree, reversing the Trump administration’s dismissal of Dellinger until a full court hearing on the matter Feb. 26. In her order, District Court Judge Amy Berman wrote that, “this language expresses Congress’s clear intent to ensure the independence of the special counsel and insulate his work from being buffeted by the winds of political change.”

With Trump’s Department of Justice asking SCOTUS to weigh in on the matter, I’ll be very interested to see how they rule — especially given how clear the 1978 law that established the office of the special counsel is on when and how the position can be terminated.

Trump’s Gutting of CISA Continues

Days before Trump was sworn in for his second tenure in the White House, I published a deep-dive into the little-known federal cybersecurity agency CISA and how the new administration might completely gut it — and why that would be really bad news for election security.

The past few weeks have seen the Trump administration attempt to dismantle the federal workforce in unimaginable ways and, unfortunately, CISA is no exception. Multiple outlets reported last week that at least 17 CISA employees were recently put on leave. The employees, according to the Associated Press, worked specifically within CISA’s election efforts, helping state and local election officials secure their elections from cyber attacks and handle foreign and domestic-based disinformation and influence campaigns.

But that number might not reflect just how bad the situation at CISA is. On BlueSky, veteran cybersecurity reporter Eric Geller reported that around 130 CISA employees lost their jobs last week and that there’s more on the horizon, with “whole divisions” that could be completely eliminated.

It’s an unsurprising move, considering that Project 2025 — the authoritarian blueprint the Trump Administration has so far followed to a tee — calls for the agency to be gutted completely. But it’s one that undoubtedly puts the security and integrity of elections in the U.S. — especially at the state level, where local election officials rely on CISA resources to securely run elections — at risk.

What Happens If Trump Defies Court Orders?

Since the minute Trump returned to the White House, his actions have been met with a litany of lawsuits. There’s currently numerous legal battles challenging executive orders Trump signed on day one: an end to birthright citizenship, the freezing of government agency funding to crucial programs and services and gutting of the federal work force — the first step in the grand plan to remake the American government into an authoritarian regime.

And, so far, the courts have mostly ruled against the Trump administration. Federal judges have blocked the White House’s federal funding freeze, the birthright citizenship executive order and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)’s access to sensitive information in several key agencies. It’s a win not just for democracy but for the constitutional laws that established the system of checks and balances that ensure the executive branch doesn’t take over with impunity.

But the Trump administration is clearly not happy about this and stoking discord about the judiciary. All of this is teeing up what some legal experts worry could be a constitutional crisis. Or, to put it simply: what happens when the Trump administration blatantly defies the courts?

“I think the fundamental answer is that we don’t know,” Aziz Huq, a constitutional law scholar at the University of Chicago Law School, recently told Democracy Docket. “There have been moments where there have been some level of defiance on nonconformities to judicial orders in the past.” He points to the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, which integrated schools and which many states, for years, defied the ruling. But even then, that was a case of the state opposing the federal government, rather than the federal government defying the courts.

A federal judge in Rhode Island ruled that the Trump administration is defying his court order to unfreeze funding for programs and grants and warned that if it doesn’t comply, it could lead to contempt of court.

Though some legal scholars are calling the current situation a constitutional crisis, Huq told me he’s cautious about calling it that. For starters, the matter has yet to reach the Supreme Court, which would have the final word on the constitutionality of the Trump administration’s executive orders. Should Trump defy the Supreme Court, that could create something of a constitutional crisis — and one that could have a chilling ripple effect.

“Once you have the President saying, “Well, I don’t need to follow a court order. What about governance? What about sheriffs? What about state legislatures or state judges? Why do they need to?” Huq said. “As with many things that the Trump administration does, I don’t think they thought through their actions and the way that it opens the door to a lot more. And it’s really not clear how that plays out.”