The Supreme Court’s Trump Enablers May Have Screwed Themselves

During
and prior to this second Trump administration, Republican-appointed judges and
justices rejected his efforts to overturn the 2020 election over 60 times. In
April and May of this year the court enjoined, pending a
final decision, the administration’s effort to summarily deport undocumented, alleged
Venezuelan gang members; the Justice Department claimed as authority the Alien
Enemies Act, a law enacted in 1798 and gathering dust ever since. The court sidelined
the administration’s (lame) statutory argument with the Constitution’s Fifth
Amendment guarantee that government cannot deprive any person of liberty
without due process of law. Roberts’ opinion for the court admonished that, for
deportation targets, the government must provide “sufficient time and
information to reasonably be able to con tact counsel, file a petition, and
pursue appropriate relief.” He chastised DOJ for flimflamming the lower courts
and the Supreme Court with falsified factual representations, and reached
outside the record to assail administration officials’ threats and actions to
evade or defy court orders.

In
2019, Roberts wrote the court’s opinion quashing
Trump’s scheme to include on the 2020 census questionnaire a question on individuals’
citizenship, intended to deter Hispanic citizens from voting; Roberts’
blistering rebuke called out Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, acting at the
behest of Trump, for lying to the public and the courts, including the Supreme
Court, “from the time he entered office,” acting in “bad faith,” spinning a
story that appears “contrived,” “incongruent” with what at least two
departments, Commerce and Justice, with White House complicity, actually did, a
“disconnect between the decision made and the explanation given.”

On
earlier occasions, in 2012 and 2015, Roberts provoked venomous, lasting fury
from numerous Republican politicians, advocates, and voters, when he twice
upheld the Affordable Care Act against challenges that would, if granted, have nailed
to the wall the Republican party’s top policy priority of extinguishing
Democrats’ premier 21st century accomplishment.