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In Trump v. CASA, the deeper issue that the Court sidestepped was birthright citizenship. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, “The gamesmanship in this request is apparent and the Government makes no attempt to hide it. Yet, shamefully, this Court plays along.”
So while the Supreme Court kicks the constitutional can down the road, Trump’s slide to full-on dictatorship intensifies. This consequence cannot have eluded the Court majority.
Except for emergency stays, the Court is out of session for the summer and will not issue definitive rulings until fall, if then. So the Court keeps the appearance of its virtue, a sham that everyone else sees through.
Once Trump v. CASA was the law of the land, Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, as good proceduralists and respecters of precedent, fell in line on the latest case. They voted with the Trump majority to overturn lower-court injunctions against Trump’s plainly illegal firings. The decision was 8-1.
It fell to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to speak truth to power. She wrote in lone dissent:
Given the fact-based nature of the issue in this case and the many serious harms that result from allowing the President to dramatically reconfigure the Federal Government, it was eminently reasonable for the District Court to maintain the status quo while the courts evaluate the lawfulness of the President’s executive action. At bottom, this case is about whether that action amounts to a structural overhaul that usurps Congress’s policymaking prerogatives—and it is hard to imagine deciding that question in any meaningful way after those changes have happened. Yet, for some reason, this Court sees fit to step in now and release the President’s wrecking ball at the outset of this litigation. In my view, this decision is not only truly unfortunate but also hubristic and senseless. |
