(Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images) |
By Stephen Rohde | James Madison, the Constitution’s principal draftsman, wrote no less than five of the Federalist Papers to explain why separating the three branches of government was fundamental to preserving liberty. “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
Today, not only are all three branches of the federal government under the control of the Republican party, they are all acting in obedient servitude to a single individual: President Donald J. Trump.
To compound the problem, the U.S. Supreme Court is employing a rarely used procedure to create a law-free zone to help Trump aggressively implement his executive orders, despite the fact that they have already been found unconstitutional by numerous federal judges.
The American people expect that when the Supreme Court decides important constitutional issues affecting their lives and our very democracy, the Court will have seriously and thoroughly considered those issues.
And lower court judges, lawyers, elected officials and others who are familiar with Court procedure expect that the Court will have considered the legal briefs of the parties and additional friend-of-the-court briefs, conducted oral arguments, met in conference to evaluate the arguments of both sides, and exchanged drafts of potential opinions before issuing well-reasoned majority (and sometimes dissenting) opinions explaining the justices’ analyses, with citations to the facts of the case and legal precedent.
There are rare occasions—such as the impending execution of a death row inmate who has yet to exhaust their legal appeals—when the rules of the Supreme Court allow for immediate temporary stays, to maintain the status quo while the Court decides the case on the merits.
But now the six-member conservative super-majority on the current Court—all appointed by Republican presidents, and three by Trump—are abusing the emergency docket, popularly known as the shadow docket, not to maintain the status quo, but to disrupt it.
(Click here to read more) |
