The Supreme Court Will Not Save Us

Its recent rulings suggest it has adopted a once-fringe legal theory

The irredeemably corrupt conservative majority of the Supreme Court has shown over the last two days that it’s hopelessly in trump’s pocket, using ostensibly procedural rulings as cover to let his lawless and criminal actions proceed unchecked. To wit:

• On Tuesday, it allowed trump to proceed with the termination of 16,000 probationary federal workers across six different agencies. Saying that some of the nonprofit groups that challenged the firings didn’t have standing to sue, it blocked the order of a federal court in California directing the trump regime to rehire the workers, who had been employed at the Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior, Treasury and Veterans Affairs departments. The lower court had ruled that the Office of Personnel Management, which carried out the firings, had no authority to fire anyone except employees of OPM. (Another lawsuit over the firings was filed in federal court in Maryland by more than a dozen Democratic attorneys general. That court, too, ordered the workers to be reinstated. The trump regime has appealed that ruling.)

• On Monday, the Supreme Court handed down not one but two indefensible rulings in separate but related cases. In the first, it shamefully blocked a lower court order requiring trump to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran migrant the trump regime snatched up and admitted it deported in error, to the US. The so-called administrative stay granted by Chief Justice John Roberts was supposed to allow the full court to consider the government’s appeal, but I wouldn’t hold my breath that the outcome will be any different once the court rules on the merits.

• In the second case, it made a show of observing procedural niceties while effectively allowing trump’s lawless and criminal deportation campaign to continue. In a 5-4 ruling, the court said that Venezuelan migrants who had sued over their illegal deportation to a Salvadoran gulag/prison had sued in the wrong court. The court did magnanimously throw the plaintiffs a sop, saying the migrants should have received advance notice and the opportunity to challenge their deportation. But the ruling, in its callous disregard for the rights of American residents, betrayed the most cramped and constipated understanding of constitutional law imaginable. The court basically said that it's a shame you were snatched off the streets and from your homes without being given the opportunity to contest your removal. But, hey, you sued in the wrong court. Too bad, so sad.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson thoroughly demolished the majority in her scathing dissent, which called out the court’s use of its emergency docket (often referred to as the “shadow docket”), as it did here. “With more and more of our most significant rulings taking place in the shadows of our emergency docket, today’s Court leaves less and less of a trace,” she wrote. “But make no mistake: We are just as wrong now as we have been in the past, with similarly devastating consequences. It just seems we are now less willing to face it.”

How Jackson can maintain her sanity when surrounded by legal arsonists like Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch and Roberts, who decide what result to reach and then reverse engineer their decisions to yield that result, is beyond me. I daresay she and the other members of the court’s liberal faction — Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor — have the most depressing jobs in the galaxy.

I used the word “conservative” in the first sentence of this post to describe the court’s reactionary majority, but there’s nothing remotely conservative about them. I only used the term because conventional news reporting has accustomed us to describe them that way. But if conservatism denotes continuity and stability, they’re anything but. They are, as I said, legal arsonists, willing to torch anything that stands in the way of their extreme and radical views, legal precedent and the letter of the law be damned.

These latest pronouncements by the court make it clear that its decision last year granting immunity to presidents (i.e., trump) for their “official” acts, far from being an anomaly, shows that it has thrown in with the “unitary executive” theory. Once a fringe legal view that bubbled up in the fever swamps of the far right, the theory holds that the president of the United States has sole, and virtually unlimited, authority over the executive branch. Practically speaking, that means he can get rid of any and all federal employees and impose his will on all executive agency decisions.

That is precisely what we’ve seen occur since trump assumed office eleven weeks ago. Therefore, anyone who thinks that the Supreme Court will step in and save us from our slide into authoritarianism and trump’s drive to assume dictatorial powers is living in la-la land. Salvation will only come when enough of us revolt at this perversion of the framers’ vision and vote the bastards out.

That, of course, assumes the Supreme Court won’t go along with any attempt by trump to block elections. But even for this supine Supreme Court, that may be a bridge too far.