This week's lesson is Sally Yates was right about everything
Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates is mostly known for two things: Refusing to defend President Donald Trump's first executive order on Muslim immigration, an order which several courts enjoined from enforcement and the White House eventually withdrew; and warning White House counsel Don McGahn about various activities of then-national security adviser Mike Flynn, whom Trump fired weeks later.
This is what made Sen. Ted Cruz's attempted grilling of Yates at Monday's hearing seem so strange. All Cruz's aggressive line of questioning did was serve to show how right Yates had been about everything.
There is a procedural argument to be had about when an attorney general should decline to make an argument in court that the president wants made. (Not one that rises to the level of worrying about whether the AG has usurped the president's executive authority, I think, since the president has a remedy if the AG won't do what he wants — he can fire her, as he did here.)
But if Yates' break with Trump on the travel ban was merely a disagreement over a "policy decision" rather than over whether the policy was lawful, as Cruz posits, why did federal courts keep blocking the order, and why did Trump withdraw the order instead of seeking to defend it in the courts?
http://www.businessinsider.com/sally-yates-michael-flynn-trump-immigration-order-2017-5
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