The Supreme Court might just be giving Donald Trump enough rope to hang himself in a court of law, an ex-prosecutor said on Saturday.
Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance over the weekend weighed in on the Supreme Court's recent hearing in a case involving a controversial law used to deport immigrants without due process.
According to Vance's Substack analysis, the Supreme Court "enjoined the government from summarily deporting alleged gang members under the Alien Enemies Act while litigation over the constitutionality of those deportations works its way through the courts."
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"The decision is a per curiam opinion, which means no single justice signed it, but it represents the view of seven of them. You can read the full decision here. It runs to 24 pages, and is worth spending some time with, if only to get the Court’s tone. Suffice it to say, the majority is displeased with the government," she wrote.
Vance goes on to tug at a "couple of threads" from the ruling.
"First, the Supreme Court didn’t tell the government what it would have to do before deporting people in order to satisfy due process requirements," the attorney wrote. "Second, they emphasized that they are granting the injunction because if they didn’t, the government would deport these people and then claim, as they have in the Abrego Garcia case, that once someone is out of the United States, even when our government is responsible for that, the courts no longer have jurisdiction to hear their cases. That’s as close as the Supreme Court ever comes to accusing the government of perfidy." Perfidy, according to online dictionaries, is synonymous with deceit or perhaps with untrustworthiness.
Vance goes on to cover Trump lashing out at the Supreme Court itself, and then suggests the court is simply "biding its time."
"If, as it appears, the Supreme Court is biding its time, giving Trump every opportunity to comply with the law while preparing to strike if he doesn’t, then Trump is making the case against himself," the ex-prosecutor said. "Just as his solicitor general told Justice Barrett during oral argument in the birthright citizenship case, this is an administration that doesn’t think it always has to comply with court orders. Instead of contenting itself with appealing them, it engages in this extreme form of rhetoric designed to turn people against the courts. And although the Supreme Court hasn’t always come to the defense of other aspects of democracy, it does seem to understand the stakes when its authority is being contested."