Supreme Court justice says Trump has conservative judges 'on speed dial'
One member of the Supreme Court of the United States' (SCOTUS) liberal minority didn't hold back in blasting both her conservative colleagues and President Donald Trump's administration.
On Thursday, SCOTUS ruled in favor of the Trump administration regarding the deportation of immigrants to countries other than the one in which they were born. While the administration initially planned to send immigrants to countries like Libya and South Sudan, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy (who was appointed by former President Joe Biden) ruled in April that the administration's proposal for the new deportation destinations was illegal.
However, the Supreme Court overturned that order in June, prompting the administration to request clarification on the legality of their proposal. SCOTUS issued its official clarification on Thursday, giving the administration its approval to move full speed ahead with the deportations of eight men to South Sudan who are currently being held in custody at a military base in Djibouti, despite their concerns that they would be tortured in the destabilized and impoverished country.
In her dissent — which was joined by Biden-appointed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor (an appointee of former President Barack Obama) argued that the Trump administration had never intended to abide by Judge Murphy's April order, and should not be rewarded for doing so. She further suggested that the administration views the lower courts as unnecessary and is empowered to bypass them entirely due to the conservative SCOTUS majority's propensity to side with him in legal disputes.
"In the end, the majority ignores the Court's rules for seeking emergency relief and creates new law on civil contempt, all to allow the government to circumvent the appellate process with respect to an order it continues to defy," she wrote.
Sotomayor further lamented that Thursday's ruling further "excuses (once again) the Government's undisguised contempt for the judiciary." She added that SCOTUS' purported clarification to the administration doesn't actually clarify if the lower courts have any power at all to issue rulings in their own respective jurisdictions. She cited a concurring opinion from the 1937 United States v. United Mine Workers ruling in which SCOTUS justice Felix Frankfurter wrote that "in a democracy, power implies responsibility. The greater the power that defies law, the less tolerant can this Court be of defiance."
"This Court continues to invert those principles," she wrote. "Today's order clarifies only one thing: Other litigants must follow the rules, but the administration has the Supreme Court on speed dial."
Click here to read the dissent in full.