Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of February 24

You can't throw the government in jail, but maybe judges can start sanctioning the lawyers? Justice department lawyers would be less likely to sign recalcitrant/illegal/unconstitutional pleadings if they knew that they would be held personally liable.

Here’s an article about that:

What Courts Can Do If the Trump Administration Defies Court Orders

Civil contempt is primarily remedial, meaning that the court’s goal is to enforce future compliance with the court order, and a party can avoid punishment by simply complying with the court order. For instance, a civil contempt order might impose a daily fine that accrues until an order is complied with, such as in 2022, when a New York state court held President Trump in civil contempt and fined him $110,000 in total — $10,000 a day for each day his legal team failed to submit explanations for not turning over documents.

Civil contempt can’t be pardoned by the president.

What if US federal marshals don’t enforce court orders? Another article says that judges could deputize state and local officials. Perhaps they could send court orders directly to the banks where government officials have accounts?

Edit: another article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/16/opinion/what-if-trump-defies-courts.html

A finding of civil contempt is not a criminal conviction, and judicially imposed sanctions to enforce civil contempt (including fines and jailing) are not criminal sentences, so they are not covered by the president’s pardon power. Still, to carry out the jail order, some federal law enforcement agency with arrest authority would need to be involved. Most likely, that would be the United States Marshals Service, which would be responsible for executing a court order to imprison a federal official. The marshals are part of the Justice Department — that is, part of the executive branch. Federal law specifies that “the primary role and mission of the United States Marshals Service” is to provide for “the security and to obey, execute and enforce all orders of” the federal courts.

Here again, the president may raise the stakes by ordering line-level U.S. marshals not to enforce the court order or by directing the head of the Marshals Service or the attorney general not to issue such an order.

Yet even that question reveals something important about the dynamic at work here. Executive branch defiance of the courts is not a simple, one-time-only decision. A prudent court will give the government officials covered by its order multiple opportunities to comply with the order and will escalate things only when the officials by their own actions (or inaction) make their defiance clear.

The other side of that same coin is that as matters escalate, a presidential administration determined to flout court orders will have to do so repeatedly and publicly and will need to continually expand the circle of federal officials who are in violation of the law — perhaps to include even the U.S. marshals themselves.