President Donald Trump’s administration has its courtroom tactics to blame for bringing a Supreme Court with a conservative super majority hand-picked by the president to issue a stunning pushback of his signature policy that a longtime columnist said took “courage” to do.
“Thank God for the Supreme Court,” the New Yorker’s Ruth Marcus wrote in an opinion piece published Monday, where she made clear that it has been uncommon for her to heap praise on the high court in recent years. “But, at a time when the legislative branch has been shamefully supine and the public has been alarmingly complacent, the federal courts represent the last best hope—at least, until the midterm elections—of combatting Trump’s outrages against the Constitution.”
Marcus told readers that the Supreme Court delivered Trump a major blow early Saturday morning in an unsigned order she called “the most heartening, and maybe most important, event of the Trump Administration so far” when it paused the administration’s deportations of Venezuelans from Texas.
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But the president and the slate of officials he selected to run – and defend – his hardline immigration policies have their bad conduct in court and inaction on the ground to blame.
“The ensuing 1 A.M. order represented the Administration reaping the results of its own bad-faith arguments and behavior with the Court," Marcus wrote. "Though the courts have not invariably ruled against Trump, the Administration’s record so far is, to use one of the President’s favorite words, sad."
It was a ruling the former Washington Post columnist said “defended the rule of law.”
“After weeks of mixed and muted messaging, the Court has spoken, finally, with clarity and strength, in support of the rule of law,” Marcus concluded. “We should take heart that at least one branch of government has the courage to do so.”
But for however much of a “backbone” Marcus said the high court displayed in its most recent split from the Trump administration, she still wondered in her Monday opinion piece: “Will their toughness last?”