There have been a very large number of court cases filed against the Trump administration, but very few have reached the Supreme Court yet.
Anyone have any thoughts on overall how the cases will go? I think the Supreme Court will allow Trump to fire political appointees. But I think the conservatives there are very strong believers in contracts and won’t let the Trump administration break contracts (labor union contracts, foreign aid contracts, scientific research contracts and a large variety of other contracts) willy-nilly. Regarding birthright citizenship I expect the Court to say that is protected by the Constitution.
The very big question though is whether or not the Trump administration will actual obey if the Court decides against it–and there are serious questions about this.
So far I only see the Court having taken action on these two issues:
I don’t think there’s any question at all. Trump will crow about the decisions that go his way, and on the decisions that don’t, he’ll ignore them and order his minions to do so as well.
Yes, that’s the million dollar question. Will SCOTUS allow the president to ignore their decisions and trample the Constitution, and how can they force a president to obey their rulings? Nobody knows the answers to these questions because we have never been here before. We are in truly uncharted waters.
I think this is likely. A year ago, I would have said highly likely but since then, the Supreme Court has twice denied certiorari in cases where they would have had squarely opine on the issue. It makes me think they are less eager to do this than I thought.
I think you are right about things like foreign aid contracts or research grants. They will uphold those. However, the Republican majority is one of the most hostile to labor imaginable. I think they will overwhelmingly find flimsy factual or statutory grounds to find against public worker labor unions again and again.
Agreed.
On other topics you didn’t raise:
Prohibiting undocumented immigrants from applying for asylum: I think Trump will lose.
Re-creation of Schedule F, effectively removing labor protections for career civil servants: This is part and parcel of the unitary executive theory, which I generally think the SC majority supports. Thus, I am inclined to think Trump will win, but based on the court’s hesitancy to weigh in on Trump’s ability to terminate Biden’s political appointees who are serving out their terms, perhaps they won’t allow this either. There are good statutory grounds under the Administrative Procedures Act to disallow his effort but those arguments could be easily disregarded if the court wanted to endorse a Constitutional unitary executive theory.
Whether DOGE violates the Federal Advisory Committee Act: Trump will win. The court will just accept the dubious facts that the work is all being done by federal employees and Musk has nothing to do with it. The majority accept a lot of dubious facts when it aligns with their idealogical wishes. Generally, when the court hears lawsuits against DOGE, they will side with the administration.
Dismantling executive agencies (USAID and CFPB): Again, this depends on whether the court adopts a strong unitary executive theory, coupled with how strongly they intend to enforce the Impoundment Act. I think Trump will win a lot of these battles if the court grants cert. With respect to the CFPB, there is a weird funding mechanism. Congress doesn’t appropriate funds each year; the agency has to request funds from the Federal Reserve. If they stop requesting funds, they can just stop doing work. There isn’t an impoundment argument with this one. With USAID, there is an obligation to spend the funds that Congress has appropriated, which would violate the Impoundment Act. Trump may win based on more dubious facts that he was just pausing things to get control of spending, which is permissible under the unitary executive theory, as is effectively delegating the oversight of USAID to the Secretary of State.
Denying equal access to the White House press room: I think Trump will lose. But this will be an order he honors in the breach and no one will take a second look. The Supreme Court will have stood on principle for the First Amendment and the independent press will still get effectively locked out.
Maybe. But they will make some rulings against Trump that he will ignore and for which he will face no adverse consequences. I think the press access case will fall into that camp. By the time a Supreme Court decision comes down, it will be so late in his administration that it won’t matter. But Fox News will under its precedent never be denied access in a future Democratic administration.
I think this will depend on which lawyers felon47 and the prexident manage to get to replace the ones who will (at least, they should be) sanctioned for fraudulent filing statemenets (or whatever you lawyer types call it) asserting Musk is not in charge of DOGE. felon47 spilled the beans on that when he was blathering to the joint houses of congress.
I think Amy Barrett is a wild card. She is a fundamentalist Christian that actually has beliefs, faith and a spine. 99% sure she believes the 10 commandments are literally gospel, and appalled at both the US president and also trump for being mighty unchristian. Barrett + Roberts + Sotomayor + Kagen + Jackson = narrow squeaking majority.
My father was a preacher man, I essentially grew up in a church in rural farm country, I think I have passing familiarity with fundamentalists.
Barrett has ‘principles’ but they do not involve upholding her duty to “support and defend the Constitution” over her crazy-even-by-Fundamentalist-standards view of Christianity. And Roberts, once the ‘thinking man’s Conservative’ who looked out for the reputation of the Supreme Court in history has thrown such caution to the wind and has now jumped on the motor coach of venal nuttery with Clarance Thomas and the rest of the barbershop quintet of Five Righteous Partisan Assholes.
Two small sparks of hope in the last few days are the revision of the OPM directive directed at terminating probationary employees has been altered to state that ‘no specific performance-based action’ regarding these employees is to be taken by the agencies following a district judge ruling that firings are illegal:
And second, that the Supreme Court has ruled 5-4 on unfreezing withheld foreign aid payments, with Barrett and Roberts defecting (ETA: sorry, I didn’t see @Smapti’s post on the same issue above before submitting):
Together, this seems to be at least some indication that court rulings have an effect on Trump’s administration, and that the Supreme Court isn’t willing to just blindly assent to all of its policies.
I think this is extremely likely. Consider this, about the second case:
By a 5-4 vote, the court rejected an emergency appeal from the Republican administration, while also telling U.S. District Judge Amir Ali to clarify his earlier order that required the quick release of nearly $2 billion in aid for work that had already been done.
Impoundment of funds specified by Congress is clearly illegal, and in this case, the funds are covering work that has already been done. This is about as straight-forward a case as we can expect, with Trump clearly in the wrong, and yet, 4 out of 9 wanted to let him get away with it.
Give one more judge just one half-assed reason to switch their vote, and Trump starts winning.
They did for ‘today’ because it was such a grotesque overreach of the completely invalid “unitary executive” theory. We’ll see how long and on which issues fundamental to democratic institutions that holds, and where it fails. That any Supreme Court justice voted to uphold this—much less four—is starkly worrisome.
Alito’s remarks are moronic. does a trial judge have “the unchecked power to compel the Government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars.” The power wasn’t unchecked, the decision was appealed. Yes, we lose the $2 billion forever- that was the intent of Congress when it appropriated the funds. Was Alito shocked to learn that when Congress allocates funds and they get spent, they do not get refunded in the future? Should have been a slam dunk 9-0 vote. Instead, we’ve got 4 members of the Reich who just need to convince one more to overturn democracy.
No question. In fact, exactly how the system is supposed to work.
I think that Roberts is beginning to get concerned that “The Roberts Court” will be “The Court that Jettisons Democracy” and feels he needs to at least put up an act that he’s trying to stop it.
I also think that the cases accepted by the court, and the decisions, are being strategically manipulated by whatever group is behind Trump. CT, i know, but with all the things that are happening in the Executive Branch now, I am certain that Trump didn’t organize it. I think there is a group of oligarchs (US and foreign) behind all this, who have hired consultants to help Trump destroy democracy.
In emergency applications filed at the high court on Thursday, the administration asked the justices to narrow court orders entered by district judges in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington that blocked the order President Donald Trump signed shortly after beginning his second term…
The Justice Department argues that individual judges lack the power to give nationwide effect to their rulings. The administration instead wants the justices to allow the Trump’s plan to go into effect for everyone except the handful of people and group that sued, arguing that the states lack the legal right, or standing, to challenge the executive order.
I read one article that said that Trump’s argument for ending birthright citizenship for the newborn children of undocumented people centers on the “subject to the jurisdiction” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. An article from CNN says
But some conservatives have argued that those long-held views are wrong because the 14th Amendment includes a phrase that the benefit applies only to people who are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. Immigrants in the country illegally, the theory goes, are subject to the jurisdiction of their native homeland.
So if these individuals aren’t subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, under what basis is the US Government deporting them?