“No Right Is Safe.” SCOTUS Bars Judges From Reining in Trump

Since President Donald Trump s first day back in office Republicans in Congress have been desperate to gut federal judges power to block his administration s unlawful executive orders policies and threats On Friday the Supreme Court s conservative supermajority gave them what they required further weakening the judiciary as an effective check on a White House that was already ignoring court orders with impunity No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates wrote liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a dissent she read from the bench calling the ruling an attack on our system of law The affair stems from the Trump administration s attempt to eliminate birthright citizenship via an executive order issued hours after Trump was sworn in Three different district court judges fleetly blocked the executive order as unconstitutional under both the text of the Constitution and more than a century of Supreme Court precedent Friday s decision did not address the merits of the executive order but instead how the judges went about ensuring the core constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship In a ruling written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett the Supreme Court s six-member conservative wing drastically limited courts authority to issue injunctions even in the face of galling illegality affecting millions of people The three judges had issued a universal injunction against the birthright citizenship executive order which meant the Trump administration could not enforce it anywhere in the country A more limited injunction would have protected just the rights of the specific plaintiffs who sued leaving the Trump regime free to target anyone who hadn t gone to court themselves But from currently forward district courts can no longer issue nationwide injunctions which conservatives gleefully sought and obtained during the Biden administration to block apprentice loan forgiveness and other policies Curiously this same Supreme Court never thought to say all the injunctions it upheld and stays it granted against Biden administration actions were outside its power observed Stanford Law professor Mark Lemley on social media But now apparently they are Instead federal courts may only use injunctions to block presidents and their administrations from violating the rights of the specific parties that filed suit In effect judges will have no ability to offer immediate relief to however a great number of people outside the courtroom are suffering from illegal actions of the executive branch The ruling is certain to spur more class-action lawsuits against the federal governing body which are still allowed but carry important procedural hurdles and additional costs The present day s ruling allows the Executive to deny people rights that the Founders plainly wrote into our Constitution so long as those individuals have not discovered a lawyer or demanded a court in a particular manner to have their rights protected wrote Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in a fiery dissent Eliminating universal injunctions requires judges to shrug and turn their backs to intermittent lawlessness Jackson wrote This decision is devastating for U S families who are not protected by the limited injunction the Supreme Court left in place explained Monica a pregnant mother asylum-seeker and named plaintiff challenging the birthright citizenship executive order in an emailed message Hundreds of thousands of other U S -born children are in danger of not receiving U S citizenship I know that every pregnant mother cannot file a lawsuit to make sure their children have U S citizenship that is why I filed this lawsuit to not only protect my child s rights but the constitutional rights of all U S -born children of immigrants Related The Clear and Present Danger to the American Rule of Law The conservative supermajority framed the ruling as grounded in history and ancient principles about the limits of judicial authority Jackson called this legalese a smokescreen that obscures a far more basic question of enormous legal and practical significance May a federal court in the United States of America order the Executive to follow the law The court s three liberal dissenters Justices Elena Kagan Jackson and Sotomayor framed the decision in catastrophic terms Perhaps the degradation of our rule-of-law regime would happen anyway wrote Jackson But this Court s complicity in the creation of a heritage of disdain for lower courts their rulings and the law as they interpret it will surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions enabling our collective demise Michael C Dorf a constitutional law professor at Cornell University wrote that the conservative wing of the Supreme Court failed to recognize that the current administration is a unique threat to the rule of law and that it was disastrous to remove such a useful tool for the judiciary to constrain the president at this particular moment It empowers an administration of lawbreakers led by a convicted criminal and insurrectionist to further evade the law It s such a threat because it empowers an administration of lawbreakers led by a convicted criminal and insurrectionist to further evade the law Dorf wrote The plaintiffs challenging the birthright citizenship order vowed to continue fighting the Trump administration In one of the cases the plaintiffs expeditiously filed a motion in Maryland district court to certify their lawsuit as a class action Even without a universal injunction we will continue to litigate this circumstance to ensure that every child born in the United States receives the citizenship that the Fourteenth Amendment promises them regardless of their parents immigration status announced William Powell an attorney representing the plaintiffs in an emailed announcement The Executive Order is unconstitutional and nothing in the Supreme Court s decision in the current era calls that ultimate conclusion into question The post No Right Is Safe SCOTUS Bars Judges From Reining in Trump appeared first on The Intercept