Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann offered a stark prediction about how Donald Trump’s administration would handle a possible court ruling restricting its deployment of National Guard troops to cities.
On the “George Conway Explains It All (To Sarah Longwell)” podcast, Weissmann — who was sitting in for conservative attorney George Conway — was asked by longtime GOP strategist Longwell if the White House would abide by such a decision.
His response was blunt: “No.”
“There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that this administration is going to say that a decision in San Francisco is going to bind them,” Weissmann said, referring to a federal judge in San Francisco’s current weighing of whether Trump’s White House violated federal law when he deployed National Guard units to Los Angeles to tackle protests over immigration raids.
Weissmann said “normal” Republican and Democratic administrations, even if they disagreed with a district court decision, would typically “put things on hold and wait for an appeal” and “have respect for the decision absent some extraordinary circumstance.”
But, he cautioned, “that is not what’s happening here.”
Instead, Weissmann argued, it’s part of a wider pattern from the Trump administration. “We see it in the immigration context, where you see just so much end-running around district courts and courts of appeals and, frankly, I think, the Supreme Court.”
The Trump White House is essentially saying, “We’re going to continue until we’re told to stop,” Weissmann added. “And frankly, as many judges have pointed out, even when they’re told to stop, judges are upset because they still go forward in a sort of, ‘What are you going to do about it?’”
Watch from the 15-minute mark here: