Is the Rule of Law Eroding in America?

In February 2021, President Joe Biden told a town hall audience, "I don't think I have the authority" to cancel student loan debt on his own. The next year he tried anyway.

He used a law meant to protect deployed service members from loan penalties to cancel more than $400 billion in federal student debt. The Supreme Court struck it down in Biden v. Nebraska (2023), ruling that the power belonged to Congress, not the president.

Three years earlier, a president of the other party made the same move. After months of negotiation, Congress refused to fund President Donald Trump's border wall. He declared a national emergency and shifted billions of dollars Congress had set aside for military construction to the wall. Federal courts ruled it illegal. The Supreme Court let construction continue during the appeal but never ruled on its legality, and President Biden ended the appeal in 2021.

Different parties, different goals, same logic: when Congress said no, the president claimed power not given to him and went around it. 

The rule of law in America is not a law of nature. It holds only while the people in power accept limits on themselves.

Leaders of both parties have tested those limits in two ways: by claiming powers the law doesn't give them, and by turning law enforcement against their opponents. The second may be the greater danger. Abuses here have not yet reached Russia's level, but the pattern has appeared under both parties.

Under the Obama administration, the IRS office that decides which groups qualify as tax-exempt flagged applicants with names containing words like "Tea Party" or "Patriot." Many waited more than a year while fielding demands for donor lists and details of their political activity.

No one was charged, but in 2017 the IRS admitted in a consent order that its treatment of conservative groups "was wrong." The government agreed to pay $3.5 million to settle a lawsuit brought by more than 400 of them.

Between 2023 and 2024, then-former President Trump faced four criminal cases and one civil case that many believe were politically motivated. Critics call this kind of prosecution "lawfare."

Neither federal case went to trial. A judge threw out the classified-documents case, ruling that the special counsel had been appointed unconstitutionally. The election case was dropped after the 2024 election under a long-standing Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president or president-elect.

The state cases drew sharper criticism. Legal scholars across the political spectrum called the Manhattan hush-money case flawed. In Georgia, the district attorney was removed from her racketeering case over an undisclosed romantic relationship with the prosecutor she had hired. That case was later dropped for unrelated reasons.

New York Attorney General Letitia James had campaigned on a promise to go after Trump. She won a $454 million civil fraud judgment using a consumer protection law never before used in a business case. An appeals court later found the penalty excessive, and both sides have appealed.

Since 2025, the Trump administration has turned similar tactics on perceived enemies. Executive orders targeted several major law firms that had represented his political opponents or hired lawyers from the Trump-Russia investigation. The orders stripped the firms' lawyers of security clearances and barred them from federal buildings.

Four firms sued, and all four won. "Settling personal vendettas by targeting a disliked business or individual for punitive government action is not a legitimate use of the powers of the U.S. government or an American president," Judge Beryl Howell wrote. Nine other firms struck deals to avoid similar orders, promising nearly $1 billion in free legal work for causes the President supports.

Then Trump publicly called for the prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey and Letitia James. In the fall of 2025, grand juries indicted both, even though career prosecutors had declined to bring charges. A judge dismissed both cases after finding the prosecutor had been unlawfully appointed, and a new grand jury refused to reindict James.

While equal justice means a former president or a state attorney general can be charged like anyone else, they cannot be singled out for scrutiny or prosecution because of their political positions. Whatever the merits of any single case, the pattern shows both parties willing to aim law enforcement at their opponents.

The good news is that, so far, the courts have ended these prosecutions. Judges appointed by presidents of both parties threw out flawed indictments, disqualified improperly appointed prosecutors, and struck down unconstitutional orders.

None of these cases touched most Americans directly, but the rule behind the first two does. Under Article I of the Constitution, only Congress can appropriate money and authorize the executive branch to spend it. It is why tax dollars go where elected representatives send them, and it is what the border wall and the loan cancellation both tried to get around.

News coverage is supposed to check abuse, but it has often failed. News outlets that support both sides have ignored or excused these abuses when the administration in question shared their politics. Citizens face the same temptation. Should they put up with overreach because they like the policy or cheer a prosecution because they dislike the target?

The rule of law rarely falls in one blow. It wears away through exceptions, each of which seemed reasonable to the people who wanted it. Even in Venezuela, which did vote for a massive change in political and economic order, its slide from one of Latin America's wealthiest countries to one of its poorest took 28 years, and it happened one step at a time.