Since January 20, 2025, President Trump has issued dozens of executive orders, several of which have attracted legal challenges. Steve Vladeck of Georgetown University Law Center and Gary Schmitt of the American Enterprise Institute join Jeffrey Rosen to parse the flurry of executive orders and preview the lawsuits they face.
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Today’s episode was produced by Samson Mostashari and Bill Pollock. It was engineered by Bill Pollock. Research was provided by Yara Daraiseh, Gyuha Lee, Samson Mostashari and Cooper Smith.
Participants
Steve Vladeck is a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center and author of the New York Times bestselling book The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic. Vladeck is CNN’s Supreme Court analyst and editor and author of “One First,” a weekly newsletter about the Supreme Court. Vladeck co-hosts the popular and award-winning National Security Law Podcast. A 2004 graduate of Yale Law School, Vladeck clerked for Judge Marsha Berzon on the Ninth Circuit and Judge Rosemary Barkett on the 11th Circuit.
Gary Schmitt is a senior fellow in the Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies program at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies issues related to the American presidency. A former minority staff director of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Schmitt was executive director of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Before joining AEI, he was executive director of the Project for the New American Century. Dr. Schmitt’s books include McCulloch v. Maryland at 200: Debating John Marshall’s Jurisprudence
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Additional Resources:
- White House Presidential Actions
- “Litigation Tracker: Legal Challenges to Trump Administration Actions”, Just Security
- Steve Vladeck, “The Impoundment Crisis of 2025”, One First Substack (Jan. 28, 2025)
- Steve Vladeck, “Trump's Guantánamo Memo”, One First Substack (Jan. 30, 2025)
- Gary Schmitt, “Presidential Impoundment, Explained”, The Dispatch (Jan. 17, 2025)
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