Stephen Miller, senior adviser to former President Trump, discussed his new group America First Legal, which he described as the “conservative response to the ACLU” during an appearance on Breitbart News Saturday, warning that conservatives will never be able to “meaningfully enact conservative and traditional policies” until they start fighting back against radical leftist policies in the courts.
Miller is president of America First Legal, a group designed to fight back against the left’s lawless actions — particularly those of the Biden administration.
“For the last four years — and this has been decades in the making — the left has truly perfected the art of lawfare,” Miller told Breitbart News Washington Political editor and Breitbart News Saturday host Matthew Boyle.
LISTEN:
Miller explained how virtually everything the Trump administration did was “relentlessly litigated” by “activist left-wing lawyers, activist left-wing groups, and then brought into the courtrooms of activist left-wing judges.”
From a practical standpoint, Miller said, something that would have taken a previous administration a week to do with executive action took Trump’s administration months and, in some cases, years. He used DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) as a primary example, noting that former President Obama did not face any significant legal challenges after issuing the memo in 2012. Trump, however, issued a memo to rescind the unlawful policy in 2017, but it remained in court for four years.
“Imagine how different history would have been if either, A) Obama had spent four years in court and was never able to implement this memo or, B) Trump had been able to rescind it in a matter of days. That’s just one of a million examples,” Miller said. “The point being, as conservatives, we have been guilty of unilateral legal disarmament.”
“And we have a situation where, if you have a president who’s politically to the left, he has a free runway to implement illegal, unconstitutional policies. If you have a president who’s politically to the right, then you don’t even have the ability to terminate your predecessor’s unlawful policies, and that fundamentally threatens our democracy because it means that some presidents have more authority than other presidents,” he explained.
That is why he launched America First Legal, which he described as a nonpartisan organization devoted to upholding America First principles, conservative values, and traditional American ideals in the court of law. The group plans to file lawsuits to uphold those principles when the Biden administration “lawlessly violates them,” Miller said, explaining the focus will remain on “executive overreach.”
“I’m doing this solely because it has to be done. This is, in short, the conservative response to the ACLU,” Miller said.
Boyle noted the right has “never had anything like this before,” and Miller explained that the group is actively consulting and advising with a number of GOP, conservative-led states and attorneys general who are litigating to stop the behavior from the administration that is both unlawful and unconstitutional.
Specifically, America First Legal is formally acting as outside counsel in a lawsuit against the Biden administration’s Catch and Release policy, representing Texas.
The lawsuit, Miller said, asks how the administration can violate “its own COVID rules” to mass release infected illegal immigrants into the country and “at the same time violate federal law” that requires illegal immigrants to be sent home.
“So this is a public health lawsuit in addition to an illegal immigration lawsuit, and we’re asking the court to direct and instruct DHS to send illegal border crossers back home, consistent with the public health regulations in place,” he said, describing it as a “vitally important” lawsuit.
“This lawsuit basically exposes the fundamental lie at the heart to the Biden administration’s border approach,” Miller said, explaining how the administration quietly revised the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) public health guidance rules “without any medical basis whatsoever” about returning illegal border crossers back home as quickly as possible.
The former Trump advisor said they changed it for “political” reasons without any legal or scientific basis.
“So that’s illegal. You can’t do that. You need to go through a formal rule-making process. You need to have a public comment period,” he said, describing the administration’s action as “extraordinarily dangerous” — effectively revising public health guidance to release illegal immigrants for political reasons.
As a result, they are going to ask a judge to rule the administration has to fully enforce the public health guidance and return illegal border crossers either back to Mexico or their home country during the pandemic, Miller said.
While Miller said he could have left the White House and spent his time doing something else in the political arena, he said he knew it was crucial to fix what he described as “this structural deficit that is utterly decimating conservative traditional constitutional values” by challenging leftist policies in courts.
“And so if we don’t fix this deficit, then we’re going to be in a permanent, forever, disadvantage. That’s why I’m doing it,” he said.
“You cannot let the ACLU be the controlling organization that decides the constitutional future of this country. Because that’s what’s happening right now is that our nation’s legal and constitutional heritage is being controlled by a radical left organization that doesn’t share your values,” Miller said. “And until we start fighting back in the courts of law, then we are never going to be able to meaningfully enact conservative and traditional policies.”
Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M. Eastern.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.