Attached are two columns that are valuable think pieces about two institutions that are under heavy threat today:

1. Judge J. Michael Luttig writes about our essential court system, and believes that our legal system will hold, “It’s Trump vs. the Courts, and It Won’t End Well for Trump.”

2. Professor Charlie Eaton writes about why and how universities must stand up to Trump, “$15 Billion is Enough to Fight a President.” T

The New York Times

Opinion

Guest Essay

It’s Trump vs. the Courts, and It Won’t End Well for Trump

March 23, 2025

By J. Michael Luttig

Judge Luttig was appointed by President George H.W. Bush and served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 1991 to 2006.

President Trump has wasted no time in his second term in declaring war on the nation’s federal judiciary, the country’s legal profession and the rule of law. He has provoked a constitutional crisis with his stunning frontal assault on the third branch of government and the American system of justice. The casualty could well be the constitutional democracy Americans fought for in the Revolutionary War against the British monarchy 250 years ago.

Mr. Trump has yearned for this war against the federal judiciary and the rule of law since his first term in office. He promised to exact retribution against America’s justice system for what he has long mistakenly believed is the federal government’s partisan “weaponization” against him.

It’s no secret that he reserves special fury for the justice system because it oversaw his entirely legitimate prosecution for what the government charged were the crimes of attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election and purloining classified documents from the White House, secreting them at Mar-a-Lago and obstructing the government’s efforts to reclaim them. He escaped the prosecutions by winning a second term, stopping them in their tracks.

But unless Mr. Trump immediately turns an about-face and beats a fast retreat, not only will he plunge the nation deeper into constitutional crisis, which he appears fully willing to do, he will also find himself increasingly hobbled even before his already vanishing political honeymoon is over.

The bill of particulars against Mr. Trump is long and foreboding. For years Mr. Trump has viciously attacked judges and threatened their safety. Recently he called for the impeachment of a federal judge who has ruled against his administration. He has issued patently unconstitutional orders targeting law firms and lawyers who represent clients he views as enemies. He has vowed to weaponize the Department of Justice against his political opponents. He has blithely ignored judicial orders that he is bound by the Constitution to follow and enforce.

There has been much talk in recent weeks of this constitutional crisis, in which the president has defied and stonewalled the federal judiciary as he has sought to consolidate his power. The Republicans who control Congress have already demonstrated their fealty to Mr. Trump. All that is left to check his impulses is the nation’s independent judiciary, which Alexander Hamilton deemed “essential” to our country’s constitutional governance. A country without an independent judiciary is not one in which any of us should want to live, except perhaps Mr. Trump while he resides in the White House.

Last week, he tossed more matches into the fire he has long been stoking against the rule of law.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump called for the impeachment of Judge James E. Boasberg, the chief judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, after the judge ordered a pause on the deportation to El Salvador of more than 200 Venezuelan migrants said to be gang members.

For good measure, Mr. Trump called the judge a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator.” All this because Judge Boasberg wanted first to determine whether the administration was correct in invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport the Venezuelan immigrants without a hearing. It’s called due process, which is guaranteed by the Constitution to ensure that no person is deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.

Within hours, the tectonic plates of the constitutional order shifted beneath Mr. Trump’s feet. The chief justice of the United States, John G. Roberts Jr. — the head of the third branch of government — rebuked the president in a rare missive. “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” the chief justice instructed.

Unbowed, Mr. Trump laced into Judge Boasberg the next day on his Truth Social platform: “If a President doesn’t have the right to throw murderers, and other criminals, out of our Country because a Radical Left Lunatic Judge wants to assume the role of President, then our Country is in very big trouble, and destined to fail!”

No one wants murderers or other criminals to be allowed to stay in this country, but to rid the country of them the president first must follow the Constitution. Judge Boasberg doesn’t want to assume the role of president; the president wants to assume the role of judge.

At a hearing on Friday, in a further development in this showdown between the president and the judiciary, Judge Boasberg expressed skepticism about the administration’s use of a wartime statute to deport immigrants without a hearing to challenge whether they were gang members, as the government has asserted. “The policy ramifications of this are incredibly troublesome and problematic and concerning,” he said.

He also said he planned to “get to the bottom” of whether the Trump administration had violated his temporary order against the deportations.

Mr. Trump seems supremely confident, though deludedly so, that he can win this war against the federal judiciary, just as he was deludedly confident that he could win the war he instigated against America’s democracy after the 2020 election.

The very thought of having to submit to his nemesis, the federal judiciary, must be anguishing for Mr. Trump, who only last month proclaimed, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” But the judiciary will never surrender its constitutional role to interpret the Constitution, no matter how often Mr. Trump and his allies call for the impeachment of judges who have ruled against him. As Chief Justice John Marshall explained almost 225 years ago in the seminal case of Marbury v. Madison, “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”

If Mr. Trump continues to attempt to usurp the authority of the courts, the battle will be joined, and it will be up to the Supreme Court, Congress and the American people to step forward and say: Enough. As the Declaration of Independence said, referring to King George III of Britain, “A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

Mr. Trump appears to have forgotten that Americans fought the Revolutionary War to secure their independence from the British monarchy and establish a government of laws, not of men, so that Americans would never again be subject to the whims of a tyrannical king. As Thomas Paine wrote in “Common Sense” in 1776, “in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”

If the president oversteps his authority in his dispute with Judge Boasberg, the Supreme Court will step in and assert its undisputed constitutional power “to say what the law is.” A rebuke from the nation’s highest court in his wished-for war with the nation’s federal courts could well cripple Mr. Trump’s presidency and tarnish his legacy.

And Chief Justice Marshall’s assertion that it is the duty of the courts to say what the law is will be the last word.

J. Michael Luttig was appointed by President George H.W. Bush and served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 1991 to 2006.

A version of this article appears in print on March 24, 2025, Section A, Page 19 of the New York edition with the headline: It’s Trump vs. the Courts, and It Won’t End Well for Trump.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/23/opinion/trump-judge-venezuela-deportation.html

The New York Times

Opinion

Guest Essay

$15 Billion Is Enough to Fight a President

March 25, 2025

By Charlie Eaton

Mr. Eaton is an economic sociologist and the author of “Bankers in the Ivory Tower.”

President Trump has declared that this country’s leading universities are sites of “anti-American insanity.” He has tried to cut their funding for scientific research. His administration has announced investigations into diversity programs and floated new taxes on university endowments. Brown and Columbia have had faculty members or former students detained and threatened with deportation. On Thursday the administration suspended $175 million of funding to the University of Pennsylvania over its policies on transgender athletes.

Fearing sanction or retribution, universities have begun to placate the administration, banning diversity statements in faculty hiring or weighing whether to strip trigger words like “diverse” from their hospital systems’ websites. In doing so, they risk abandoning their roles as centers of free speech and critical debate in the name of appeasement.

Top universities must instead exercise the financial independence afforded by their endowments, which are commonly valued in the tens of billions. Their leaders should collectively declare they will not suppress lawful free speech, diversity programs or campus research to appease any president. The wealthiest universities, in particular, must pledge to use all available endowment funds as a backstop for any federal funding cuts to research, educational programs or student financial aid at their schools, barring any donor restrictions. Endowments could even fund legal defense for students and scholars who are threatened with deportation.

Thus far, university presidents have largely kept their heads down instead of uniting to oppose Mr. Trump’s assault. That is a mistake. A key authoritarian strategy is to single out prominent individuals or institutions for repression so that others, afraid, forgo legitimate criticism of the authoritarian leader. Often universities are some of the first institutions that authoritarians attack. Make no mistake: The Trump administration’s punitive cuts to federal research grants and detention of university students or faculty members, couched in the president’s grievances over diversity programs and campus protests, are early signs of this strategy at work in America.

The most egregious example of this strategy was the administration’s decision to cancel $400 million in federal funding for Columbia University, in part because the school officials did not quickly rein in campus protests about the Gaza war last year. The administration promised to negotiate with the university to restore that funding if the campus complied with nine preliminary demands, which included expelling or suspending students, centralizing its disciplinary process and placing the university’s Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies department under academic receivership. On Friday the university conceded to some of the administration’s demands.

But what if, instead, Columbia chose to weather the storm?

The university has an endowment of nearly $15 billion. The $400 million in federal cuts would have been distributed across multiple years. However, even if Columbia were to freely spend $400 million more from its endowment in a single year to make up for the funding shortfall, its withdrawal from the endowment that year would increase to just under 8 percent from around 5 percent. Several universities engaged in similar extra spending during the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Columbia’s endowment would probably continue to grow even if it maintained this spending increase in perpetuity. Its annual endowment rate of return averaged around 8.5 percent over the past five years. The endowment also receives around $200 million in donations annually. Other wealthy endowments have done even better. The Trump administration could cut more of Columbia’s annual government grant and contract revenue, which totals roughly $1.3 billion. But Columbia can, at the very least, afford to challenge the legality of those cuts — ideally together with other wealthy schools. Columbia and its peers could further turn to sympathetic alumni to replenish endowments strained by the president’s attacks. The fund-raising appeals would write themselves.

In short, were the university to choose to defend itself, some simple arithmetic suggests that — at least financially — it could. Easily.

It’s not too bold to predict that every university president will face a similar choice in the coming months. So far, some universities have found initial success with lawsuits to block federal research funding cuts. But nearly a dozen wealthy universities have already announced plans to trim their spending. Harvard, with a $53 billion endowment, has announced a hiring freeze. Stanford, with a $38 billion endowment, has done the same.

The Big Five private universities with the largest endowments — Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton and M.I.T. — should have the most room to maneuver. Their endowments, each valued at over $20 billion, have grown around tenfold (after inflation) over the past 40 years while enrollment has increased only by a fraction. Even universities with endowments valued over just $5 billion, on average, spend less than 5 percent of that each year. If they won’t spend their wealth to defend their academic missions, what are they hoarding it for?

Universities sometimes call on the idea of intergenerational equity — that endowments should be preserved to provide comparable benefits for future generations — to limit spending their endowments. In this climate, intergenerational equity is little more than a fallacy. If those universities fail to defend free speech and scientific research now, future generations could lose their treasures to creeping authoritarianism.

The stakes are so high that those of us who care about free inquiry and academic freedom cannot sit by and hope that university presidents and boards of trustees will step up. Our university leaders will no doubt worry that tapping endowments will rattle their biggest donors. They may be right to. Even once-liberal billionaires have sought to make their own peace with Mr. Trump rather than face his wrath. Other donors may want their alma maters to rethink what they see as extreme developments in campus free speech and inclusivity. To those concerns, defenders of the university should welcome critical self-examination and even reform but not at the whim of a U.S. president. Students, staff and faculty members and concerned alumni must press their university leaders to use endowments to protect their fundamental educational missions first, before reform begins.

At public universities, especially those with smaller endowments, community members could work with university leaders to seek a funding backstop from state governments. Twenty-two Democratic state attorneys general from California to North Carolina have already joined universities in litigation to block Mr. Trump’s cuts.

State budgets may be strained by a shaky economy and other federal spending cuts pushed by the president. For this reason, the wealthiest universities and progressive state governments carry the most responsibility. They have the most resources to push back against authoritarian creep. Large endowments, long hoarded, can and should foot the bill. For all our sakes.

Charlie Eaton, an economic sociologist, is an associate professor at the University of California, Merced, and the author of “Bankers in the Ivory Tower.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 26, 2025, Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: $15 Billion Is Enough to Fight the President.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/25/opinion/trump-university-endowment-spending.html