Defying Court Orders

Heed the Ohio Lesson…Swift Accountability is Needed Or You Lose the Rule of Law

Day 104 — March 16, 2025

From a rule of law standpoint, yet another shocking day as the Trump Administration ignored a court order and carried out the first action under the Alien and Sedition Acts since World War II.

A judge had ordered the administration to halt flights that were being undertaken under a highly questionable legal justification. As I explained yesterday, the Act only applies when we are at war with a foreign nation, which is not the case here.

Yet the administration violated that order, claiming that because the planes in question were in the air and outside of American airspace, they were beyond the reach of the court:

Think about what would happen if that argument—that “the planes have already left the country so we can ignore a judicial order”—prevailed. So long as anyone, American citizens or not, are whisked away quickly enough, courts would never be able to stop it. No review whatsoever of either individual cases, or the broader action and its justification.

Not a single American is safe under that logic. We are all at the mercy of Steven Miller and Tom Homan deciding who needs to be hauled out of the nation.

What To Do

Take it from those of us in red states: anything but swift accountability here by the courts will spell disaster.

We in Ohio and other red states have seen this horror movie before…too many times:

We’ve watched right-wing politicians openly violate court orders for years on essential, constitutional matters.

And while they openly violate and defy those orders, we’ve watched those same lawbreakers directly attack as partisans the justices that ruled against them (even when, in Ohio at least, the Chief Justice who ruled against them was in their own party). Using much of the same language we are hearing right now.

We’ve watched them threaten impeachment.

We’ve watched them rig the rules of judicial elections here to unseat those who ruled against them, and assure that future courts are as partisan as they are (ie. no longer independent), and rule in their favor.

Then we’ve watched them continue to violate court orders until those elections took place, and those new, “friendly” courts emerged.

Then we’ve watched those new courts overturn or ignore the orders that the lawbreakers refused to follow all that time.

And here’s the bad news….it all worked!

From school funding to extremely gerrymandered districts to the manipulation of ballot language to the endless attacks on democracy that are now being waged by an illegally gerrymandered legislature, Ohio is only where it is today because the lawbreaking officials violated court orders so many times, and for so long, all while attacking the independence of the courts they viewed as their enemy, that they ultimately prevailed.

They got away with it all.

And amid it all, they never faced accountability for their actions. They were never held in contempt of court. Not a single time.

People just assumed they would at some point follow the court orders, which they never intended to do.

So they kept right on going, and destroyed Ohio’s rule of law in the process.

Judges across this country must learn the lesson.

Anything but swift and robust accountability by the courts—accountability that, finally, puts the fear of God in these lawbreakers—will lead to the same result for the nation.

Anything short, and the rule of law will evaporate just as it has in Ohio.