rayiner, I'm curious what you think about Dershowitz' argument that she should have resigned?
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/the-administration/317...
But I think Dershowitz ignores crucial situational context. He says: "A responsible attorney general would seek to analyze these complex issues before jumping into the political fire with a blanket refusal to defend any part of the order." That's fine and good in theory, but this order was implemented over a weekend with apparently no vetting by the DOJ. It was almost certainly unconstitutional as applied in many situations. And Yates would have to send attorneys into courts to defend the order right now. She did not have the luxury of taking time to figure out what "parts of [the order] are legally defensible."
Remember, contemporaneously with firing Yates, the White House did a 180 on one of the key legal interpretations: that the order applied to green card holders. You do not go into court and advance a legal argument, and then tell the court sometime later "oh, now that we have had a chance to actually analyze these complex legal issues, we were wrong on A, B, and C." As a supervising lawyer, Yates could not tell her subordinates "defend the order for now, but we may have to walk some of this stuff back once we figure out what is actually legal."
On top of that, the AG has additional obligations as an attorney. An attorney must sign her name to every legal argument she makes to the court. She may not permit a non-attorney to override her legal judgment. Here, the AG did not hold a press release discussing the politics of immigration. She told her subordinates not to make legal arguments defending the order--arguments she would have had to sign her name to. It is absolutely an exercise of professional judgment, not policymaking.
Of course Trump can fire her for any reason. But the public is also entitled to draw reasonable inferences from those actions.