A Constitutional Redline | David Cole, Daniel Drake
This week the NYR Online published an open letter signed by eighteen constitutional scholars from across the ideological spectrum that argued that the Trump administration’s treatment of Columbia University “risks deterring and suppressing constitutionally protected speech.” One of the signatories is David Cole, who since Trump’s inauguration has been writing in our pages about the dangers of the president’s encroachment on the Constitution. Cole, the former national legal director of the ACLU and a professor of law at Georgetown, has been writing about legal issues for the Review since 2004. At the end of a week in which the government escalated its attempts to deport thousands of people on dubious legal grounds and succeeded in extracting from Columbia University a number of concessions after threatening to withhold $400 million in federal funding, I called him to ask about what is beginning to seem like a constitutional crisis. Daniel Drake: There are many serious legal issues unfolding right now. The Trump administration seems to be testing the extent of its power, from the detention and deportation of …