Roberts, joined by the court’s four liberals justices, notably did not conclude one way or the other whether DACA is legal. But Yoo has made the case in several articles that the court, in its ruling, invalidated one of the main checks on presidential power: the ability of new presidents to immediately undo executive action enacted by their predecessors.

Critics called Yoo's ideas disingenuous and unconstitutional.

Victoria Nourse, a Georgetown University law professor, said, “Yoo’s track record should warn you that he is given to claims that are out of the mainstream."

Yoo is relying on a false premise: that the court upheld Obama’s creation of the DACA program in the first place, said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas.

"To call it an embarrassing analysis is to dramatically understate just how nefarious it is,” Vladeck wrote in an email.

On Twitter, Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe wrote that Yoo’s take on the DACA decision “is a wildly irresponsible and, of course, unconstitutional ‘reading’ of" the decision."

Yoo told The Associated Press on Thursday that he has had multiple conversations with senior administration officials in which he has made the case that a June Supreme Court ruling that rejected Trump’s effort to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program , or DACA, opened the door to enormous new presidential power.

“I said, ‘Why not just take the DACA opinion itself and do a search-replace. And every time it says ’DACA' ... replace it with ‘skills-based immigration system,’" Yoo said he told the White House. “This gives President Trump an alternative to create such a program, at least for a few years."

Not long after the conversations, Trump began promising a series of new executive orders on a range of issues.

“The decision by the Supreme Court on DACA allows me to do things on immigration, on health care, on other things that we’ve never done before," Trump said in an interview on Fox News Sunday, predicting "a very exciting two weeks." --snip--