'Faded away': Expert despairs as Supreme Court ends 'glimmer of independence'

Any sign that the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court were interested in checking President Donald Trump's power have subsided, legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern wrote for Slate in a scathing roundup of the court's agenda this term.

He focused particularly on the abrupt heel-turn of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Trump's third appointee.

His column follows the court's abrupt decision to allow the Trump administration to deport migrants to South Sudan, despite them never having been to that country and despite a near-total lack of due process.

"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," wrote Stern. "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."

The particularly notable thing about the sudden shower of shadow-docket decisions nullifying lower-court checks on Trump, as well as the potentially landmark Trump v. CASA decision that puts new limits on the ability to even block illegal orders from the Trump administration, is how quickly the Supreme Court's modicum of resistance to Trump fell apart, Stern wrote.

"From January through March, the court looked to be taking a cautious approach to his presidency, seeking out compromises and imposing limits on his authority," he wrote. "Early on, Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s vote seemed to be in play, as did Chief Justice John Roberts’, to a lesser extent. Along with the liberals, the two justices forced Trump to attend his criminal sentencing shortly before he reentered the White House. They ordered his administration to pay out $2 billion in foreign aid that it illegally withheld."

The two justices then joined a few liberal dissents when the majority allowed Trump to resume certain illegal deportations and withhold Education Department grants.

However, he continued, "By May, these glimmers of independence had faded away. Roberts and Barrett now appear to be almost entirely on board with Trump’s agenda, enabling his consolidation of power at the expense of the other branches, the states, and the people. Perhaps they have simply given up trying to police this administration, fearing that, if they continued to try, they would reveal their own impotence in the face of an aspiring autocrat. Or maybe, as CASA suggests, they believe that the biggest outrage of Trump’s term so far isn’t his own lawless agenda, but the lower courts that dare shoot it down."

At this point, Stern continued, the only areas in which these justices shoot down Trump, as with placing limits on the Alien Enemies Act for deportations, it "may be better understood as preserving the court’s own authority — reminding the president that, in the end, the justices get the final say on what the law requires."

But all too often, that say still goes in Trump's favor, he concluded.