The Supreme Court Is Trump’s Partner in Crimes Against America

Donald Trump inflicted plenty of damage on the United States over the course of his first four years in office, but the most enduring blow may have been his radicalization of the Supreme Court. He appointed not one, not two, but three conservative justices, all of whom were hand-selected by right-wing activists. 

The remade court quickly paid dividends, issuing decisions overturning Roe v. Wade and granting Trump immunity from prosecution for acts committed while president. Now, it’s actively enabling the restored president’s fascist regime. 

The conservative justices have already made it harder for judges to shut down Trump’s lawlessness and overtly unconstitutional orders — such as his effort to eliminate the constitutional guarantee to birthright citizenship — and keeps allowing him to fire ostensibly independent regulators and government workers en masse without any basis. Worse yet, the court has decided that Trump can arbitrarily deport immigrants to third-party countries to which they have no ties, even to exceedingly dangerous countries like South Sudan, with little opportunity to challenge the government’s decisions. 

Today, the Supreme Court issued perhaps its most profoundly un-American ruling yet, allowing Trump’s masked immigration thugs to indiscriminately stop people on the streets because they are speaking Spanish or working as day laborers in the construction industry, so Trump officials can check their citizenship status and add more victims to the administration’s churning deportation machine.

The court continued to allow Trump to ax independent regulators today, as well, with Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily greenlighting the president’s ability to fire Rebecca Slaughter, a member of the Federal Trade Commission. Slaughter’s lawsuit over her termination will continue. 

Just a few months ago, it looked like the Supreme Court — even with its Trump-picked conservative supermajority — might try to rein in some of Trump’s most authoritarian impulses. The court reiterated that Trump had to respect immigrants’ right to due process before summarily shipping them to a foreign gulag, and ordered the administration to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man it illegally deported to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador.
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But after Trump and his administration for months refused to comply with the Supreme Court’s order regarding Abrego Garcia, and as Trump and his team have led a blistering PR campaign against judges who rule against them, the conservative justices have changed their tune. They are now not merely acting as his lapdogs, but his accomplices in a wave of crimes against the American people and all else who reside here. 

The Supreme Court has issued an unprecedented number of rulings from its “shadow docket,” without the cases having been fully briefed or argued, that have paved the way for Trump to satisfy his most fascist urges. In many of these rulings, the conservative justices haven’t bothered to explain to the public why they’re aiding Trump’s challenges to bedrock American rights, his immigration crackdown, or his sweeping efforts to consolidate power.

In their recent media tours, conservative Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh have defended the court’s shadow docket decisions, and the president’s reliance on them, as basically normal. 

Barrett, who’s currently hawking a book, said last week that the justices “don’t get to pick the track that a case is on when it arrives to us,” and downplayed the court’s birthright citizenship decision. 

“In that case, we did not have the birthright citizenship question before us,” Barrett told Bari Weiss of The Free Press. “The only issue that the government sought emergency relief on was the question of whether district courts could enter these things that are called universal injunctions.”
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The court’s decision limiting universal injunctions — in a case involving Trump’s effort to delete the right to citizenship of those born on U.S. soil, which is enshrined in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — was, of course, a boon to the president’s efforts to enact his authoritarian agenda. 

Kavanaugh, for his part, suggested the shadow docket should instead be called the “interim docket,” and that presidents have sought emergency relief at the Supreme Court on a “totally bipartisan” basis.

Unsaid is the fact that the Trump administration has rushed to the Supreme Court for such emergency relief far more often than his predecessors — and the president is experiencing never-before-seen levels of success in such cases. 

Kavanaugh did kindly explain his vote regarding the administration’s stop, frisk, and deport strategy. He wrote in a concurring opinion that the following conditions “taken together can constitute at least reasonable suspicion of illegal presence in the United States” and thus justify the policy: “that there is an extremely high number and percentage of illegal immigrants in the Los Angeles area; that those individuals tend to gather in certain locations to seek daily work; that those individuals often work in certain kinds of jobs, such as day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction, that do not require paperwork and are therefore especially attractive to illegal immigrants; and that many of those illegally in the Los Angeles area come from Mexico or Central America and do not speak much English.”

He argued this is no big deal: “Importantly, reasonable suspicion means only that immigration officers may briefly stop the individual and inquire about immigration status,” he wrote. “If the person is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter.”

Speaking with Weiss, Barrett argued that America isn’t experiencing a constitutional crisis.
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“I think the Constitution is alive and well,” she said. “I don’t think that we are currently in a constitutional crisis. I think that our country remains committed to the rule of law. I think we have functioning courts.”

The Supreme Court, unfortunately, is functioning as Trump’s partner in crime — and it’s making America’s constitutional crisis a whole lot worse.