Updated February 11, 2025 at 18:20 PM ET
On Monday, U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. said the Trump administration had violated his order to unfreeze federal spending, despite a temporary restraining order issued last month blocking the administration’s efforts to pause payments for grants and other federal programs.
The White House has said that a review of federal funding is necessary to ensure that spending aligns with the president’s agenda. But it also stated that officials are acting “in good faith” to interpret the court’s ruling and quickly resume any affected funding.
The case is one of many lawsuits challenging Trump’s executive actions and their legal limits.
“That’s certainly unusual. Unusual to call out a party that is not paying attention, that is not following the rules that he’s laid out,” retired federal judge Nancy Gertner told NPR’s Morning Edition.
Gertner, who consulted on a number of lawsuits against the administration, argued that Trump’s actions are unquestionably illegitimate. But the question is whether a judge can do anything to stop an administration once it has breached its constitutional limitations.
“You have to find irreparable harm and the bar is high,” she said.
She emphasized that a judge has many tools that could force an individual or company to comply, but not a president. She said the many enforcement tools afforded to the courts may not be effective against this administration.
Here’s the full interview with Gertner, edited for length and clarity.
Leila Fadel: What happens if a president decides to just ignore court rulings?
Nancy Gertner: The court, a judge has said, has tools available to him or her in the first instance. They can cite the parties in front of them for contempt. They can impose fines, of course, since one of the parties—arguably, here, Elon Musk—it’s not clear that fines are going to make a particle of a difference. There’s even the possibility of imprisoning someone until the order is followed. All of these are obviously empty threats with respect to the defendants in this case. The marshals would have to enforce whatever orders the judge entered. The problem is that the Marshal Service is under the Department of Justice, and if Trump wanted to fully not comply, he could direct the Department of Justice not to comply.
At that point, you have a full-on constitutional crisis. You have one branch of the government ignoring the legitimate comments—the legitimate orders, rather—of another branch. Let me also say, the other thing available to Trump, because he doesn’t agree with the judge, is to appeal. And so, to some degree, hastening a constitutional crisis says something about what he’s trying to do—which is more about showing his power than it is about following the law.
Fadel: Now, the administration has publicly questioned the judiciary over rulings to block executive actions. What’s your reaction to this claim—that it is actually the courts that are out of line and trying to block legitimate executive power, staging a judicial coup of some kind?
Gertner: Well, the key issue is the word legitimate. The question is whether or not Trump is exercising power in a legitimate way. When he violates the Administrative Procedure Act—which says that you can change regulations only if you follow certain procedures—when he violates the Privacy Act, threatening to release the names of the FBI agents who arguably participated in January 6, when he holds up the funding of programs that have been appropriated by Congress—that’s the question of whether or not he’s acting in a legitimate fashion.
And these cases are essentially saying there’s nothing remotely legitimate about what the president is doing under these circumstances. I can’t emphasize enough how difficult it is for a judge to enter a temporary restraining order, which is the case here. In these cases, you have to find the likelihood of success on the merits, and you have to find irreparable harm, and the bar is high. It says something about how far Trump has gone from what the legitimate lawmaking function is in these cases that judges are doing this.
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