Trump DOJ Lawyer Correctly Describes Congress’s History of Circumcising Presidential Power
During oral argument in the cases about Trump’s executive orders targeting law firms, a Justice Department lawyer brought up a very different form of severability.
Over the past year or so, President Donald Trump has transformed the Justice Department from one of the legal profession’s most prestigious employers into a gaggle of loyalist weirdos who, in any other administration, could not get anywhere near the DOJ headquarters unless they happened to be driving by it. Whether they are actively lying to annoyed federal judges or merely issuing inadvertent, typo-ridden reminders of their incompetence, right now, government lawyers have never been more unserious or less worthy of your respect.
I am saying all this because, as a journalist, I have to give credit where it is due. On Thursday, a Justice Department lawyer named Abhishek Kambli appeared before a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit to defend Trump’s executive orders that target various law firms by (among many other things) revoking the security clearances of lawyers who he believes have wronged him. And during oral argument, Kambli said something that is, to the best of my knowledge, absolutely true: that in this country’s 250-year history, the president’s power to determine “who gets to access classified information” has “never been circumcised by Congress.”
Evidently, no one on Kambli’s team had the presence of mind to slip him a note, because about two hours later, in the same context, he said it again:
Far be it from me, of course, to praise the Trump Justice Department, whose principals have focused on using the power of their offices to do things like “facilitate school resegregation in Louisiana” and “ensure that Black people in Alabama do not have access to modern sewer services.” In my view, these are legally wrong, morally bankrupt choices, and I condemn them in the strongest terms. But facts are facts, and whatever my policy disagreements with Kambli and his colleagues, I cannot deny that neither chamber of the United States Congress has ever applied a Gomco clamp to the foreskin of the president’s authority to revoke individual security clearances, and then used a scalpel to carefully remove it after waiting between three and five minutes.
Another casualty of the second Trump era has been the federal government’s interest in investigating cases of public corruption; according to NPR, since Trump took office in January 2025, the department’s once-vaunted Public Integrity Section, created in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, has gone from some 40 staffers to just two today. In recent months, the Justice Department has instead been far more preoccupied with offering lucrative, taxpayer-funded settlements to Trump allies who have sued the government. Among the myriad challenges that future presidents will have to tackle is rehabiliating the DOJ’s reputation for professionalism and independence, now that the least employable members of the conservative legal movement have frittered it away in roughly 12 months.
My opinion is that the nation’s top law enforcement agency should not (1) function as the president’s personal law firm or (2) use public resources to settle his petty grievances while enriching his personal friends. That said, I am not above conceding when those with whom I do not see eye to eye are objectively right about the facts. Simply put, I can offer no rebuttal to Kambli’s contention that U.S. lawmakers have never limited the scope of executive power by retaining the services of a mohel. Candidly, I am not sure that the average octogenarian member of Congress would have the slightest idea what to do if they were invited to attend a bris, let alone handed an izmel and a screaming infant and instructed to get to work.
For Kambli, who rose to prominence in right-wing circles litigating culture-war cases as a deputy in the office of the Kansas Attorney General, Thursday’s oral argument was something of a last hurrah in public service: According to Bloomberg, Kambli plans to leave his position effective May 31 for a to-be-announced role in the private sector. After accidentally invoking a penis-related surgical procedure in open court when he could have just used the word “limited” instead, perhaps selecting an earlier departure date would have been a prudent choice.
[h/t to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick on Bluesky]
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