On Thursday afternoon, the Supreme Court issued a brief order condemning eight migrants to banishment in South Sudan, where they face the very real possibility of torture and death. None of the eight men had ever set foot in the war-torn African nation, and they had all been expelled from the United States without due process in direct violation of a lower court order, reported Slate. But SCOTUS didn’t care. What mattered to the majority was that Donald Trump’s administration wanted to dump them in South Sudan immediately. And nothing—no federal law or treaty or constitutional guarantee—was going to stop it. Not under the watch of this Supreme Court.
Thursday’s brutal order neatly encapsulates the SCOTUS term
that drew to a close less than one week earlier. Aside from a few sporadic
attempts to rein in Trump’s most lawless excesses, the court has largely given
up policing the president’s power grabs. More frequently, in fact, the
conservative supermajority facilitates his abuses of power by
expanding executive authority to new heights, sapping strength from Congress
and the lower courts in the process. And on the rare occasions when SCOTUS does
draw a line, it seems more concerned with preserving its own supremacy than
placing meaningful limits on Trump’s authoritarian impulses.
Less than six months into the second Trump administration,
the Supreme Court has settled on a posture of complicity toward the executive
branch’s assault on civil liberties and democracy itself. The 47th president
seeks to restructure the government around his own whims, blasting through any
barrier that restrains him as he embarks on a project to illegally
freeze spending, end
birthright citizenship, and disappear
noncitizens to black sites, among other autocratic ambitions. And six
Republican-appointed justices are falling over themselves to help him do it.
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