Trump’s pandemic relief orders are likely to face legal challenges

Throughout his presidency, Donald Trump has faced a barrage of lawsuits from top Democrats and liberal advocacy groups challenging his broad assertions of executive power, usually over contentious issues like his crackdown on sanctuary cities or his refusal to cooperate with congressional investigations.

Now, however, the president faces a battle over a set of executive actions he issued on Saturday providing economic relief measures that many of his fiercest critics actually support, including weekly federal unemployment payments, student loan relief and efforts to protect tenants from eviction during the pandemic.

With those actions, Trump is trying to wrest core powers away from Congress, after weeks of discussions over a second pandemic rescue package stalled on Friday. Democratic lawmakers, who were pushing for a much more expansive relief plan, have called the orders an insufficient stopgap that will be difficult to implement. And in the coming weeks, the president’s directives are likely to get tied up in litigation over whether they violate core constitutional principles like the separation of powers.